DDRescue-GUI v1.5 has been released, and it’s better than it ever was before!
Mac Users
This release is particularly good for Mac users, because there are once again a shed-load of improvements for the OS X version! Most notably that you can select a log file again (this didn’t make it into v1.4, because it wouldn’t work at the time), direct disk access is available, and reverse and preallocate modes are as well.
The Settings Window on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
On the more nerdy side, there is now a “fat” binary of ddrescue included for OS X, which is both 32-bit and 64-bit, which means the main package for OS X is now 64-bit, because it runs better on most macs like that, but there is still the 32-bit version for older macs that use the Intel Core Solo and Core Duo processors too 🙂 The 32-bit version will work on a 64-bit mac as well, so if you’re not sure which one to download, go for that one.
The Main Window on OS X 10.11 El Capitan, part way through a recovery.
Linux Users
There a few improvements just for Linux users too 🙂 Most importantly, if the user is running on Parted Magic, you can’t save the log file or output file in /root any more, which is good, because there’s very little space there on Parted Magic, and your recovery would end very quickly! The elapsed time counter is fixed too, so it, umm, works 😀 In v1.4 it used to sometimes not count seconds properly. I have no idea why it did that, but it works now.
Part way through a test recovery on Mint 17.3 (My favourite Linux distro!)
All Users!
Most of the improvements are for both platforms 🙂 A lot of them a relatively boring bug fixes, so here are the best and most helpful few changes:
The output box now behaves like a terminal, so ddrescue overwrites its own output as it tries to pull data off your drive, rather than scrolling. This helps, because it mean you can see the initial status stuff too if you want to, as you can see in the screen-shot above. The settings window will now remember the settings if you go back to double-check them before starting, too, which is great for pedantic people like me who like checking everything five times!
You can’t accidentally change the insertion point in the output box either, which used to mess the formatting up. If ddrescue got stuck trying to exit prior to v1.5, the GUI would wait for it indefinitely, and now it’ll prompt the user five seconds after aborting the recovery, asking to try stopping ddrescue again or to continue to wait for five more seconds. If the platform uses wxpython 3.x (this means Ubuntu 15.04 or higher, Mac OS X, and probably Parted Magic in the near future), some dialogs will have custom buttons as well to improve ease of use.
Lastly, thank you to everyone who has asked questions and reported bugs on this project, you’ve all helped me make this program a lot better 🙂 You can download it and see the full changelog here, on Launchpad.
Hi!
It doesn’t matter what the destination partition is formatted as because ddrescue will overwrite it during the recovery.
It might if there’s not enough of the data there yet, but if you use a log file you can stop and restart as you please without losing your progress or any data.
Hope this helps,
Hamish
I’m new to linux and disk failures and now I’m a bit confused!
Could you explain me how shoul I store the log file and.. what exactly is it going to take up in terms of space and where can I store it on my ubuntu 16.04 60 gb partition?
Hi,
You should store the logfile on a different disk to both the source and destination disk, maybe something like a USB drive 🙂
It won’t take up much space, even on a really damaged disk I’d be surprised if it used more that 20 MB.
It’s just a normal file, so you save it like any other 🙂
Hope this helps,
Hamish
My unreadable data over 1 tb was about 120 mb (1300 bad sectors); is there anyway to make ddrescue read and try to rescue the failing parts until them are totally cloned???
Thanks for the support! 😀
Hi,
Yep, you can do that.
If you go to settings, you should see the “No. of times to retry bad sectors” choice. If you leave that at 2 times, that will probably pull all the remaining data you’ll get off the drive, and then just make sure “Direct Disk Access” is checked, and “Do a soft run” isn’t checked, and you’re good to go 🙂 You might not get all the data, but that should get everything possible.
You’re welcome, and hopefully this helps,
Hamish