HDDSuperClone - A new Linux hard drive cloning/imaging tool

[maximus]

I would like to introduce HDDSuperClone, a new advanced Linux based hard drive cloning/imaging tool. The current free version is comparable to gnu ddrescue, and should actually be better in some ways. Please visit the home page for more information.

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsuperclone

[maximus]

I have received very little feedback on the free version of HDDSuperClone so far, so I am bumping this up to try to get more people interested in the cloning tool. Only one person (thank you!) has provided productive feedback and I have addressed the issues that were found so far. More need to try it out and test and provide feedback, that is the only way bugs can be found and improvements can be made.

[higgsboson]

Appreciate all the efforts maximus.
I think something new should be implemented to make it attractive. Pls. try to add following --

1) SMART status check
2) Retry count selection / Skipp range when error is encountered
3) Registers status check
4) Self bootable USB pen drive
5) Reverse cloning

thanks.

[maximus]

Appreciate all the efforts maximus.
I think something new should be implemented to make it attractive. Pls. try to add following --

When I first saw this I wondered if we were talking about the same tool. But after thinking about it you may not be aware of some of the improvements that have been made since the original release because I have not posted them here, but only on my website. That makes me more aware that I may need to advertise it more in the future. I have not been doing that much as I felt it needed more testing before I was going to try to get the masses interested in it. I think it is stable enough now though. Below is my answer to the list of your requests, in the order that I chose to answer them:

5) Reverse cloning

Ummmm, are you saying that the --reverse option doesn’t mean reverse?

1) SMART status check

The SMART status check is a good idea to put into the tool and will definitely be considered for future versions when it becomes GUI driven, but at this time the SMART status is very much achievable with my HDDSuperTool program. I guess this is not advertised in any way though…

2) Retry count selection / Skipp range when error is encountered

I am not exactly sure of what you are asking here, but HDDSuperClone uses multiple passes with a very special self-learning head skipping algorithm that makes the best attempt to get the most good data first. And while I only have a small number of drives to test it on, I can say that it has performed exceptionally well in all cases so far. And after all that there is the option --retries to retry the areas marked as bad.

3) Registers status check

This may not be totally possible in the free and lite versions as they will only use the passthrough ability of the Linux drivers. At this time the free version only uses SCSI passthrough which interprets the registers and provides the result as sense key data, which is present in the progress log file. I may very well allow the ATA passthrough in the free version in the future which will show the error and status registers in the log file. That data is returned from the last command attempt, but once a drive locks up it is not possible to get any future registers this way. But knowing the return from the last command is very helpful and the program should be able to sense a device fault that would require power cycling and the drive and will exit with a specific exit code and message if this is detected. The full version is the only version that will be capable of real time register access, but only the free version is available at this time.

4) Self bootable USB pen drive

At this time it is in no way feasible for me to attempt to provide a complete bootable media. That is a HUGE undertaking It is not anywhere near as simple as just copying and pasting my program into a distribution, unfortunately it does not work that way. And even if it was that easy, I would have to upload a huge file every time I made a small update to the program. While I may entertain the idea in the future (but don’t get your hopes up), I have done my best to make it easy to install and run. I have recently even added DEB and RPM installers for Debian/Ubuntu and Redhat/Fedora, which can actually even be easily installed temporarily when using a live CD. With all that being said, I have tried to word the license for the free version so that it can be included in a distribution created and maintained by someone else. I state that the free version can be freely distributed as long as the documentation and license agreement are included. I wrote that with the hope that someone would be interested in including it in some sort of recovery distribution. But for me to maintain such a distribution myself would be too much work at this time.

[maximus]

2) Retry count selection / Skipp range when error is encountered

I would also like to add that it is possible to control which copy phases are done, and the starting and maximum skip size can be set. It is possible to make it clone almost any way you would like with the right command line options. One just needs to read the manual an try it out.

[higgsboson]

Hi
yes tool is getting matured with every build. Keep it up.

[maximus]

I would like to add that I have done what I said I was not going to do and I did create a Live CD ISO image that is available on my website. I would also like to add that further updates to HDDSuperClone will be posted in the software section here: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=33291