so i have managed to get a copy of this software but im having issuies with it locking up the pc and in general not working.

i have disabled driver signature enforcment, switched the sata ports to native ide mode, forced the program to run in xp2 compatability as an administrator, and im running from 32 bit vista.

When i select a port and open the royl interface and select identify i get nothing but access violation or no drive connected and very long periods of not too much happening, i have managed to get to identify my boot drive but not a failed member, and then it would not list smart info etc...

is there something I am doing wrong ?

can i run the software under wine with linux ?

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drugstoredir2014.com

It detects the port's it detects the drives and lists them but if i open up the extended interface i get no responce from the drive apart from an identify.

I compiled the latest ddrescue from source and managed to image the 500gig drive in only 13 days
but the last passes of bad blocks was going so slow on the trimming and splitting phase and was going at 120 b/s so i thaught i would try to fix the slow down issue with wdr and clean the defect list.

I have recovered everything but some stuff is corrupt such as pictures having grey bars and tearing, or unable to be opened and this i can understand but i was hoping recover more using wdr.

What is so special with the pc3000 card over that of an standard pci paralell or serial interface?

Im guessing the pc3000 interface has the ability to reset the drive if it fails to respond in a specified while keeping the os happy via handshake giving it mimic responces like the drive was still connected to aviod lockups?

would such an interface work with free tools like ddrescue and under linux or mhdd under windows avioding crashing etc?

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drugstoredir2014.com

The card is essentially just an expensive dongle for IP protection. You can implement the "reset" feature using about $20 worth of hardware. The on/off switching could be achieved with a couple of high-side P-channel MOSFETs, and the control could come from an I/O port such as USB, COM or LPT. But trying to convince ddrescue's developers to touch their baby in any way is pointless. They don't think that it needs improvement -- they like it just the way that it is, never mind that it sometimes bashes your drive for as long as 6 months. They're coders, not hardware people. Believe me, I've butted heads with programmers all my working life, and I've found it almost impossible to communicate with them. In fact I've had to write my own code, as bad as it is, to fix bugs and placate an irate customer, and I had to do all this in secret to circumvent the red tape. If you want ddrescue to do something special, then you'll probably have to add the feature on your own. Fortunately it's open source. If I were 20 years younger, I would fix it myself.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

an audrino attached to a usb port, or directly driving the rs232 control pins seems like a good solution cheap too!!

A soft reset in ide it is easy as you just drive a bus reset on the interface sata is a bit different as it is done via serial commands.

but the kernel may throw a hissy fit if the drive does not respond I'm guessing the card mimics the drives interface to keep the OS happy when it is being reset.

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drugstoredir2014.com

Section 4 of the following document explains how a hardware imager handles the reset problem:

http://www.deepspar.com/pdf/DeepSparDis ... paper3.pdf

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

you could ues the sucessfull read time in dd rescue to reset the ide bus by the reset pin on the ide bus or de powering the drive.

but the issue with this is that the kernel would throw a hissy you would have to make an emulation device to pass on commands to the kernel during the reset phase, the other option would be a custom kernel, I dont think either would be an easy task unless you halted the processor on the mother board during the reset.

most modren pc's have i2c control of the processor to enter a low power/halt state during this reset function, but that envolves designing it to a specified hardware or motherboard.

I see why they have special hardware with embedded logic, Is it an micro controller or a clpd device on one of these boards or some sort of custom hdd interface controller chip?

In saying that the xbox is able to control the ide reset line via i2c from the smc micro.

The xbox would make an awesome candidate for a hardware recovery cloning device, as its kernel recovers from these failures rather gracefully compaired to a pc, hot swapping a booting drive is something that is done to softmod them.

im supprised none has attempted to make a disk imager out of an xbox or other gaming system with an embedded ide controller.

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drugstoredir2014.com

Im not surprised, though this would be quite do-able... probably fairly cheap and relatively easy for anyone with some experience in interfacing and microcontrollers and working with different buses.. the problem is that we are trying to work, make money and the r & d time required to get a system up, and suitable for a good chunk of drives AND to be able to keep updating and developing.. well it just isn't feasible. It is why we buy the tools and spend the time trying to help the vendors get them working

A few of the tools aren't even tools per se.. just a form of copy protection, or a cheats way of getting around the difficulty modern(or should I say programmers that write software these days) operating systems security hurdles.

I have been toying with the idea to use video cards to correct ECC in Flash memory (think password cracking machine, CUDA) but I just don't see it coming through due to the broken time I get to work on it, My not very great coding skills and amount of work coming in.

Theoretically you could use an arduino or beagle board to pass the appropriate commands(emulated) to the kernel while you reset the IDE bus.

Biggest problem isn't the obvious one, it is getting the individual that has all the right attributes to do it: time, motivation, skill, related experience.