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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: August 22nd, 2019, 10:26 
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maximus wrote:
maximus wrote:
maximus wrote:
I am considering stopping my work on HDDSuperClone, and just making it open source with limited or no further support. It is taking up way to much of my free time to maintain and update it, plus the expected support. And only a small number have purchased the pro version. The small amount of extra income I have gained from it is not worth the time and effort. This is not set in stone yet, but I am really seriously thinking about this.

After some thought, I will be keeping on with my work, but I may change how I handle support, and maybe not as many updates/fixes as quick. So if someone has an issue at a time where I don't have the time, then I may say I don't have the time, and that I don't know when I will get to it.

So to go back on this a little bit, if I wanted to dump/sell hddsuperclone, what would someone be willing to pay for the source code? If I were to sell it, it would be as-is. Once sold I would not want to support it in any way. My man-o-pause mid-life-crises voice in the back of my head is asking. Not saying I will do this, but need to ask.

I seem to remember someone already offered to buy this from you. He will give you a target price.

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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: August 22nd, 2019, 17:32 
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ddrecovery wrote:
maximus wrote:
maximus wrote:
maximus wrote:
I am considering stopping my work on HDDSuperClone, and just making it open source with limited or no further support. It is taking up way to much of my free time to maintain and update it, plus the expected support. And only a small number have purchased the pro version. The small amount of extra income I have gained from it is not worth the time and effort. This is not set in stone yet, but I am really seriously thinking about this.

After some thought, I will be keeping on with my work, but I may change how I handle support, and maybe not as many updates/fixes as quick. So if someone has an issue at a time where I don't have the time, then I may say I don't have the time, and that I don't know when I will get to it.

So to go back on this a little bit, if I wanted to dump/sell hddsuperclone, what would someone be willing to pay for the source code? If I were to sell it, it would be as-is. Once sold I would not want to support it in any way. My man-o-pause mid-life-crises voice in the back of my head is asking. Not saying I will do this, but need to ask.

I seem to remember someone already offered to buy this from you. He will give you a target price.

I know I am flip-flopping like a crazy woman that can’t make up her mind (hope that doesn’t offend anyone, but it is kind if scaring me as I like to consider myself a sane man, and my brain does not seem to be cooperating with me lately). But IF I were to sell it, I think there would be two scenarios.

1) Someone offered me a stupid amount of money, way more than I thought it was worth. In that case, I would say it is all yours, without caring what you do with it. I would offer some initial support if needed to make sure the transition went as smooth as possible, but after that, I would wash my hands of it. Maybe DeepSpar would like to buy it to kill it as competition, but that would cost, and probably never happen.

2) Someone wanted to buy it for a reasonable price, maybe something along the lines of what I have made from it in a year, and keep it going and maintain it for their own sales and profit. They would need to be familiar with C programming, and ambitious enough to follow up on potential bugs and fix them, and hopefully even come up with improvements and new functions. For awhile I would offer limited support for the code as far as where and what to look for the bug fixes, but no actual coding.

This is just a what-if thing right now. Part of me wants to just get rid of it so I don’t have to deal with it and spend time on it. But another part of me would have trouble letting go, and thinks that I can figure out how to deal with the time being spent on it, and make adjustments. After all the time I have already spent on it, I would hate to see it wither away and die. I kind of like to think if it as "my baby" (okay, maybe not the best way to put it, but it is the best my brain can come up with right now).

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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: August 22nd, 2019, 17:43 
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Okay Loretta. We see where you are coming from now.

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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: August 22nd, 2019, 18:24 
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ddrecovery wrote:
Okay Loretta. We see where you are coming from now.

LOL :lol:
I like to think I am a very logical person. So I am trying to analyze myself to see what is wrong with me. And there is one thing that is coming up that maybe is subconsciously having an affect on me, even though I really don't see it as a big deal. I am about to turn 50. I was fine with 40, but maybe my brain is now saying "hey, you are about to become f***ing old, and I am going to make you think about it even when you don't think you are".

Maybe that is TMI, but maybe being open about it will help me fix myself (or just make me look like that much more of an idiot) :roll:

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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: August 22nd, 2019, 19:23 
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Arch Stanton wrote:
I see on your user comments page:

"I'M VERY SATISFIED! Your FREE VERSION outperformed ALL cloning software that I know"

As a side note, he also states it outperformed DiskPatch which TBH isn't too hard as it relies on BIOS extened int13 calls. So that's going through and dependent on more layers/black boxes. Anyway, I made DiskPatch a few decades ago and there's also success stories to tell about that tool. But my point is people paid for the disk clone option, I disabled that in the free version. There was a scan option that they could try to see if it could read the source disk. IOW, this HDDSuperClone FREE user could have been a paying customer.

What I have noticed is that tech shops and people who cloned disks that were not end users / home users actually were paying for a tech license. And in that light I don't fancy the short term / long term thing. As an end user I have this intuitive 'no' when it comes to very limited time licenses even if I intend to use something only once. What if I need it a second time just too late for my license to work .. For a while I did had a mechanism in place where it was easier to use tech license on multiple PCs where the end user version locked itself to a hard disk. Can't exactly remember how I did that though. But I dropped that at some point and still sold tech licenses.

Anyway, just sharing this FWIW.


Thank you, that was very informative. I want to reply to all of it, but that would be too much.

As for the free version being a paid customer, the free version is meant to be better than ddrescue so it advertises itself to get people aware (you just said you put a link on one of your pages, so that has worked, otherwise it would have been to ddrescue). For hard drive recovery, the best software only tool was ddrescue, and the next step up was an expensive hardware imager. HDDSuperClone is meant to fill the gap, but it needed to start getting mentioned, that is why I did the free version the way it is. The pro version is meant to be a competitor for the hard drive imagers, capable of things no free software can do, at a fraction of the cost.

As for the intuitive “no” to the limited time license, as long as the user knows it will expire, but then can just buy another limited time license, why would that be a “no”? If they hit the limit right when they need it, they can either buy another short term license, or own up and by the full license to make sure that doesn’t happen again. I have sold short term licesnes, so it’s not like it doesn’t sell.

Part of the reason I offer the cheaper short term license is because the pro version features can be somewhat complicated to use. I have someone that doesn’t even want the pro version for free because they can’t understand how to use it. So a cheap trial makes sense. If you can’t figure it out with the short trial, then you would not buy the long term license. It is a cheap way to try it, and if you like it you will buy up.

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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: August 22nd, 2019, 19:53 
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To get back to reality (if even for a short time), is there anyone that would be interested in a short term trial to test out the new Direct USB mode? I want to put it to the test.

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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: August 25th, 2019, 8:21 
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New version of HDDSuperClone released:

version 2.2.0 20190824
* Fixed a bug with SCSI write
* Fixed a bug with Direct USB inquiry
* Other fixes for SCSI passthrough for inquiry and read capacity

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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: August 29th, 2019, 20:08 
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So now that I have released the Direct USB mode, there is not much else I am planning on adding to HDDSuperClone. So maybe now it is time for some marketing, and a stab at DeepSpar DDI4. So I am putting the following on the website for the Pro version. The content on the website may change in the future, but this initial post should be good for the forum.

The Pro version of HDDSuperClone has many abilities of a hardware imager, such as DeepSpar DDI4. Let’s take a look at it can do.

Just a reminder, HDDSuperClone is a Linux only tool, there is not any Windows version, nor will there ever be.

Hardware imagers can work with unstable SATA (and PATA) drives by being able to perform soft/hard resets on drives using timeouts. HDDSuperClone Pro can also do this using only the computer hardware itself.

Hardware imagers can also perform power cycles on the drive when it becomes unresponsive. HDDSuperClone Pro can also do this, although you need to follow the instructions on the website for what relay to purchase and how to wire it.

Hardware imagers can image by head on supported drives. This is done by using vendor specific commands to map the data to the heads. But if the drive is not supported, the hardware imager cannot map the heads. HDDSuperClone takes a different approach. It does not map heads directly, but instead uses a self learning head skipping algorithm to skip around the bad head and bad areas of the drive. This has proven to be very effective at getting data from the good heads/areas first, and without the need of any special commands, so it is capable of working on any drive. This ability is actually part of the free version, the Pro version only lets this be accelerated.

Some hardware imagers have the ability to work with USB drives (such as the USB Add-on for DeepSpar), with read timeouts and power cycles, similar to the features when working with SATA drives. The new Pro feature Direct USB mode also allows this (again, for power cycles you need to purchase the proper relay, and wire it according to the website instructions).

A good hardware imager will also have a way to perform data extraction, without having to clone/image the entire drive. HDDSuperClone can also do this with the Virtual Driver mode. This presents the live recovery as a virtual disk to the Linux system. A recovery tool such as R-Studio can then read from the virtual disk, which invokes reading through HDDSuperClone, to access the filesystem and target and recover files and folders.

The really good hardware imagers also perform firmware repairs. That is something that HDDSuperClone cannot do. HDDSuperTool can perform the WD slow fix on some drives, but that is it. If you are looking for firmware fixes, then you would need to look at other firmware repair tools. HDDSuperClone is for cloning/imaging, not fixing.

So as you can see, HDDSuperClone Pro is capable of many of the features of a hardware imager. But it is only a fraction of the cost. I do have to admit that it may be a bit more complicated in some ways, but if you read the user manual carefully, and you are technically capable of understanding how to use a hardware imager properly, you should be able to make it perform just like a hardware imager in the ways described.

HDDSuperClone Pro is basically a poor man’s DeepSpar DDI4. There may be some advantages to the DeepSpar, but they would come at a big price for what they are. HDDSuperClone Pro can do many of the things that the hardware imagers claim a “software only tool” can’t do.

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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: August 31st, 2019, 8:46 
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maximus wrote:
So now that I have released the Direct USB mode, there is not much else I am planning on adding to HDDSuperClone. So maybe now it is time for some marketing, and a stab at DeepSpar DDI4. So I am putting the following on the website for the Pro version. The content on the website may change in the future, but this initial post should be good for the forum.

The Pro version of HDDSuperClone has many abilities of a hardware imager, such as DeepSpar DDI4. Let’s take a look at it can do.

Just a reminder, HDDSuperClone is a Linux only tool, there is not any Windows version, nor will there ever be.

Hardware imagers can work with unstable SATA (and PATA) drives by being able to perform soft/hard resets on drives using timeouts. HDDSuperClone Pro can also do this using only the computer hardware itself.

Hardware imagers can also perform power cycles on the drive when it becomes unresponsive. HDDSuperClone Pro can also do this, although you need to follow the instructions on the website for what relay to purchase and how to wire it.

Hardware imagers can image by head on supported drives. This is done by using vendor specific commands to map the data to the heads. But if the drive is not supported, the hardware imager cannot map the heads. HDDSuperClone takes a different approach. It does not map heads directly, but instead uses a self learning head skipping algorithm to skip around the bad head and bad areas of the drive. This has proven to be very effective at getting data from the good heads/areas first, and without the need of any special commands, so it is capable of working on any drive. This ability is actually part of the free version, the Pro version only lets this be accelerated.

Some hardware imagers have the ability to work with USB drives (such as the USB Add-on for DeepSpar), with read timeouts and power cycles, similar to the features when working with SATA drives. The new Pro feature Direct USB mode also allows this (again, for power cycles you need to purchase the proper relay, and wire it according to the website instructions).

A good hardware imager will also have a way to perform data extraction, without having to clone/image the entire drive. HDDSuperClone can also do this with the Virtual Driver mode. This presents the live recovery as a virtual disk to the Linux system. A recovery tool such as R-Studio can then read from the virtual disk, which invokes reading through HDDSuperClone, to access the filesystem and target and recover files and folders.

The really good hardware imagers also perform firmware repairs. That is something that HDDSuperClone cannot do. HDDSuperTool can perform the WD slow fix on some drives, but that is it. If you are looking for firmware fixes, then you would need to look at other firmware repair tools. HDDSuperClone is for cloning/imaging, not fixing.

So as you can see, HDDSuperClone Pro is capable of many of the features of a hardware imager. But it is only a fraction of the cost. I do have to admit that it may be a bit more complicated in some ways, but if you read the user manual carefully, and you are technically capable of understanding how to use a hardware imager properly, you should be able to make it perform just like a hardware imager in the ways described.

HDDSuperClone Pro is basically a poor man’s DeepSpar DDI4. There may be some advantages to the DeepSpar, but they would come at a big price for what they are. HDDSuperClone Pro can do many of the things that the hardware imagers claim a “software only tool” can’t do.

\
My 2 cents ..

Honest. but a tad too much on what it CAN'T do. So, IMO you'd describe what it CAN and intends to do and maybe get into that it is ideal for for example repair techs that want to offer up to a certain level of data recovery. So, I am a subscriber to some tech forums as well and many have no idea about hardware imagers. So when you start comparing mainly against those they don't have a clue what you're talking about. And rather than mainly comparing to them and their prices, show what you offer for your price.

Apart from hard core data recovery geeks, I think there's this grey area between PC repair and specialized data recovery. Educate the lot in this grey area and outline how cloning is standard practice in data recovery.

Give some examples of cases where it can be useful in recovering data so that potential buyer can see what to expect. I mean in my DiskPatch days we got lucky plenty of times with scenarios where Windows explorer would hang trying to access a drive, while it worked fine with the clone. I am sure you have similar experiences and examples. Or where pretty good Windows based data recovery software would lock up hang while scanning a drive and worked fine once cloned.

And maybe after that compare to hardware cloners/imagers etc..

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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: September 1st, 2019, 20:16 
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Quote:
Honest. but a tad too much on what it CAN'T do. So, IMO you'd describe what it CAN and intends to do and maybe get into that it is ideal for for example repair techs that want to offer up to a certain level of data recovery.

Yeah, I was thinking about the can't stuff after I wrote that. I have updated the website with much more of a can do approach version of that. I will have to work on examples and scenarios to help people understand it, which has kind of been in my bucket list for awhile. All of that takes time, which I only have so much of, so this will be a work in progress.

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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: September 11th, 2019, 12:11 
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I've had some success with HDDSuperClone and wouldn't want to see you give up on it. I having been using the free version but will be trying the short-term licence for my next data recovery job. I have used DDI4 in the past and really liked it but it is very expensive if data recovery isn't your core business. If the pro version can do quite a bit of what DDI4 does it's got to be worth a go..


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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: September 14th, 2019, 11:33 
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Just paid for a 60 day subscription for the PRO version and am testing it out. Seems a great product for what is not very much money. There's nothing else like it on the market at this price..


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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: September 14th, 2019, 19:20 
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alfarom wrote:
Just paid for a 60 day subscription for the PRO version and am testing it out. Seems a great product for what is not very much money. There's nothing else like it on the market at this price..

Please do test, and report any findings. One thing to remember is that many drives that are stable and only have some bad sectors can be recovered by the free version just as good as the pro version. The purpose of the pro version is for unstable drives, and also for use of the timeouts for those who know how to use them to speed up a recovery. And also the virtual drive for data extraction.

As far as I know, there is no other software only tool that has the main pro functions. All others require purchasing hardware (aka hardware imager). Obviously you need to purchase the relay if you need power cycles, but I am not counting that. Maybe someone in China has something, but nothing I know of in the English speaking world.

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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: September 15th, 2019, 10:56 
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I'm going to get the Relay. It looks easy to setup and use..


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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: September 27th, 2019, 9:07 
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Just recovered most of the user data from a friend's hard drive with HDDSuperClone Pro and must say I am pretty impressed. There was no money involved as the data wasn't that important but I said I'd give it a go to test out the product.
The drive wouldn't work in Windows at all. In fact it stopped Windows from booting or locked it up if connected afterwards. Couldn't seem to mount it in Linux either but somehow HDDSuperClone managed to scan it and recover a fair bit of user data. Of the 2 heads one seemed to be badly damaged as far as I could tell.

It was a bit of a pain getting the drive setup in SATA mode as you have to hide the drive from the OS apparently but I managed it in the end.

To sum up..

Positives..
-Well worth paying for the pro version, especially the 60 day licence if data recovery isn't your core business.
-Seemed to image better than any other software I've used.

Negatives.
No serious negatives. If it were possible I would like to see..
- More user friendly GUI. Although as it runs in Linux most users will be pretty comfortable with the setup and operation.
- Not a serious criticism of the program but it would be great to see a YouTube channel showing various aspects of the software in operation.
- In this case it took a day or so to image the drive. However, that may well have been the case using DDI4 or any other hardware imager due to the damage on the drive.

To Sum Up.
-Excellent utility for a computer repair business that wants to do a bit more data recovery but can't justify Deepspar.
-Could fill the niche market where customers will pay a reasonable amount for data recovery but won't or can't pay professional data recovery rates.
-I will continue to use it as it a product that has been continually developed to a point where it is a serious bit of kit..

Keep up the good work Maximus.


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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: October 5th, 2019, 20:50 
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There has been no reply from the developer on this or other forums in the last week. I think that is what will hamper the marketing of this excellent software. All it really needs is a YouTube channel and prompt responses to questions, particularly for people who are using the paid version. It's no using building a better mouse trap and expecting people to come hammering on your door.
You've done the hard work developing this product, it's now time to spend a bit of time selling it.
I've paid for the 60 day licence and think it's a great bit of kit but I won't pay for a permanent licence if there is no support for it..


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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: October 6th, 2019, 8:30 
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I am sorry, I did intend to reply to your review, but got busy with other things and it slipped away. But to be fair, you didn't really ask a question or say anything that I felt I had to reply to. I felt your review was fair, and I did not disagree with anything.

As for support, see "got busy with other things" above. Some of those other things were other people with real issues that I had to deal with, where I was in daily email contact, plus spending time working on their issues. I am actually still working on an activation issue, which has now lead me to pay for a new website host, and I am trying to figure out from scratch how to use the available tools to construct at least the part of the website I need for the activation. Everything takes time, and I have to prioritize my time. Maybe someday I will actually be able to find time to write some good how to instructions, maybe even a few videos.

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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: October 6th, 2019, 9:56 
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Fair enough. It's is such a good product it would be a shame to not get it out there, either as you say, with more instructions, or even better with a YouTube channel.


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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: October 8th, 2019, 23:21 
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Hey maximus, long time fan, first time poster.

Ever think about getting an unpaid intern to maintain the source and implement features so you don't suffer periodic development burnout?

If so, consider this my application, I'm new to data recovery but well versed in linux, C, passable in GTK and ncurses (possible text mode only implementation?) I can send you some small C projects I've written so you can judge my skill with the SG_IO ioctl, gtk, NTFS parsing, etc. I've even build up a nice-to-have feature list that further obsoletes ddrescue and goes where no hardware imager has gone before:

Floppy disk, cdrom, scsi_generic, and raw support: you can quickly change the "ls /dev | grep sd" in your source to "find /dev -name 'sd[a-z]' -or -name 'fd[0-9]' -or -name 'sg[0-9]' -or -name 'sr[0-9]' -or -name 'raw[0-9]' " to get the drives to list in drive selection. Then take it a step further, floppy drives operate on IO ports 3F2, 3F4, 3F5 - floppy disk direct mode is an option and no utility that I know of besides the DOS-based NFORMAT! actually writes to the stepping speed register of the floppy drive, so lots of unique things to explore there and floppy disk rescue is still an important area of data preservation. Secondly, most CDROM drives with CD-ROMs loaded can be put into red book mode where the drive reads the full 2,352 byte sector as audio instead of data mode "12 byte sync, 3 byte address, mode byte, 2,048 byte data, 4 byte checksum, 8 byte zero, 276 byte ECC" which allows you to perform the ECC after averaging several passes of red book reads (like you did in ddrutility with read long). Lastly, since hddsuperclone reads the capacity off the drive directly (unlike ddrescue) you can utilize a dev/raw/raw* device without trying to image MAX_UINT64 bytes like ddrescue.

Also as a nice-to-have, for standard cloning through a block device (/dev/sd*) a way to configure /sys/block/<target>/device/{io_timeout, eh_timeout, timeout, queue_depth} and maybe the 'unbind' option to remove the sd driver from the equation (access over /dev/sg*)

While new ideas are coming to mind, hddsuperclone sometimes has issues allocating memory physically in the correct < 4GB address, but since your already doing so much over "/dev/mem" and already requiring editing kernel boot parameters for direct, you *could* reserve physical memory directly as well with the kernel option memmap=SIZE$ADDRESS and have ram at that address that the kernel wont touch, but you can over /dev/mem.

Anyway I'm rambling so I'll stop here :D


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 Post subject: Re: HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging t
PostPosted: October 9th, 2019, 18:35 
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Location: United States
You seem very ambitious, and that is good for you. You also seem to have done a bit of reverse engineering on hddsuperlcone, which indicates you have some potential. I think you should focus more on trying to make your own software. I started by trying to patch ddrescue to make it work like I wanted, but it was not the direction the author wanted to go. So I eventually made my own program, which I would like to add is MUCH more complicated in many ways. The same applies here, your ambition is good, but it does not match the direction of hddsuperclone. The only way you will be happy with your ideas is to do them yourself. It is not as easy as you think, but if you are smart and ambitious, you can do anything. That is how I got where I am.

So there is the pep talk, now for the reality. HDDSuperClone is not meant for floppy disk or cd. There are other tools for that, and if you want to write your own that is better, then go for it. And if you think you have a better way with scsi passthrough or other block device types, then go for that too. I am more focused on the things that can’t be done the normal ways, like the direct modes. As for memory, that is all for the direct modes, and I had to perform some voodoo magic to make some things work from user space. Try to do DMA from user space and you will start to understand. Plus the driver in the paid version takes care of the 32 bit address issue, so no need for any kernel options.

As for helping, the only way I would ever provide source code is if I sold it, or just openly published it. Either way, the only way I would give out source code is if I was truly done with it, and no longer willing or able to support it. My direct modes are my secret, to which there is no roadmap that can be found online.

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Home of HDDSuperClone


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