> Josh Lange wrote: > > The next logical step after recovering data is to attempt to wipe the > > drive,
Antonio Diaz Diaz replied: > Ddrescue is designed to ignore read errors, but it quits as soon as it > finds a write error. What you want is exactly the opposite of this. > > Moreover, I think there exist some disk wipping programs. Perhaps > someone could tell me if none of them is able to wipe a drive with I/O > errors. In this case, perhaps it would be worth to modify ddrescue. Yes, there are some disk wiping programs out there. Most drive manufacturers have that feature in their free diagnostic tools. I have links to six of these diagnostic programs on my "links" page, plus links to a couple of other disk-wiping programs: http://www.geeksalive.com/links.html#dft There are very good reasons to not send in a drive for warranty replacement unless the drive has first been wiped: http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/06/one_year_ago_ha.html However, if you simply overwrite a failing drive with all zero sectors (which is what the manufacturers' utilities do), the drive might remap the bad sectors, and it might (temporarily) appear to be a good drive. If that happens and you then send the drive back to the manufacturer for warranty replacement, the manufacturer might claim it is a good drive and refuse to honor the warranty! So I wanted a disk wiper program which would zero out only the good sectors, and leave the bad sectors alone. That way, the drive will still test bad (i.e., with unreadable sectors). So I wrote a little Perl script which uses the ddrescue logfile to determine where the bad sectors are, and zeros everything else. I named it ddrwipe.pl, and it is part of my collection of about a dozen Perl scripts for use with ddrescue, here: http://www.burtonsys.com/download/ddr2sr.zip Here's the "help" screen which is generated if you run ddrwipe.pl with no parameters: --------------( begin help screen )-------------- ddrwipe.pl ("zero-out the GOOD sectors on a bad drive") v.3, 13-Sep-06 Usage: perl ddrwipe.pl /dev/hdd drive.log script2zeroit ./script2zeroit or, to generate 'dd' commands instead of 'ddrescue' commands: perl ddrwipe.pl -d /dev/hdd drive.log script2zeroit or, to immediately write to the drive, instead of generating a script: perl ddrwipe.pl -i /dev/hdd drive.log or, to immediately write to the drive, but skip rest of block on errors: perl ddrwipe.pl -iq /dev/hdd drive.log or, for verbose output: perl ddrwipe.pl -v /dev/hdd drive.log script2zeroit ... --------------( end help screen )-------------- Regards, Dave _______________________________________________ Bug-ddrescue mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-ddrescue
