HDDSuperClone

jol

Member
maximus":1pqad6po said:
Linux is a bit funky about that. I did make desktop links on the live cd, but I am not sure about being able to do that with an installer.
dont make it so hard
after installation completed, execute a command to make a link on the desktop
Code:
ln -s /path/to/hddsupercloneGUI ~/Desktop
 

maximus

Member
Starting it from a simple click isn't so simple. The program needs to be started with root access, which complicates things. The desktop entries on the live CD actually open a terminal window that starts the program with sudo, and if needed Linux will ask for the user escalation password in the terminal window. As long as I can reproduce that across at least most flavors of Linux, I will do that.

At one time I found it was very easy to include a program link in the standard accessory menu. But I then found the problem with root access. And to make my point on that, I have installed R-Studio which has a link to open under one of the program area menus, but it is about useless opened that way as it can't even list drives because it doesn't have root access. I have to run it from the terminal with sudo.
 

maximus

Member
This is the desktop entry that works on the live CD. But I don't know the limit of support for this across different Linux flavors.

Code:
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=HDDSuperClone       
Comment=HDDSuperClone
Exec=x-terminal-emulator -e "bash -c 'sudo hddsuperclone;$SHELL'"
Icon=utilities-terminal
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;
Name[en_US]=HDDSuperClone
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
Even if you can build a version that works reliably in Debian variants would be fine with me.
 

maximus

Member
If I can easily make the desktop icon work safe and sane even if just on Debian I will do that. If there are any complications then it will wait for later.

Right now I have realized a couple things that I need to address with the pro version. The first is a memory issue when the computer has 4GB or more of memory, mostly affecting 64 bit OS. I worked some crazy voodoo magic to get it to work at all, but sometimes it requires many restarts of the program before it gets all buffer memory in the 32 bit range, which can be very annoying (even to me). Now that I have the driver working, I am able to use that to get the proper memory. I think I have that figured out, although at this time the driver does not start automatically and must be started from the menu. I am leaving it like that in case the driver does not work for some reason.

The second thing is that to work with direct mode, the drive must be disabled (hidden from the OS). The instructions are somewhat complicated to do that with an OS installation, and I need to automate that process. It is bad enough that it has to be done manually if using the live CD, but doing it for an installed OS could be a bit overwhelming.
 

maximus

Member
I have decided there is one more thing I need/want to upgrade before the release. I want to update the live cd from lubuntu 14.04 to 16.04. This means I need to update the programming OS as well to match. I can already tell this is going to involve a lot of cursing. The only thing that will possibly keep me sane is the fact that I use vmware workstation and can do snapshots.
 

nissimezra

Member
maximus":pyhws9zz said:
I have decided there is one more thing I need/want to upgrade before the release. I want to update the live cd from lubuntu 14.04 to 16.04. This means I need to update the programming OS as well to match. I can already tell this is going to involve a lot of cursing. The only thing that will possibly keep me sane is the fact that I use vmware workstation and can do snapshots.
Maximus,
Another success with WD 3.5 1TB the drive couldn't even pass the bios. After the patch worked like new. No errors when patched both 02 and 32.
The drive has 2500 bad sectors and many more pending

Regards
 

maximus

Member
Let the cursing begin! After working out a couple of issues just running 16.04.4 as my primary programming OS, and finding a third issue that involves my driver but seems solvable (kernel change that requires conditional compilation), I managed to produce a live cd based on 16.04 and it seems to work, for the most part. But along the way I found some crazy results. First, I found out there is difference between 16.04 and 16.04.2 and up. They kernel version of 16.04 and 16.04.1 is 4.4 which is okay, but 16.04.2 uses kernel version 4.8 which is unable to return ata register results in passthrough mode. And 16.04.4 uses kernel version 4.13 which completely locks up one of my test computers when trying to list drives in passthrough mode. I have not tested the direct modes yet (I think they may be okay), but they are f***ing up the ata passthrough big time, and that was part of the standard, not even special crazy things I do for the direct mode.

Things like this are why programming is not easy, and why people that write software hope to get compensated for it. They need the extra money to pay for hair transplants after they pull all their hair out! So now I have to go back and install plain 16.04 and see if it can work okay to produce a good working live cd. More work to do (and more beer to drink while trying to keep my f***ing sanity). If I find any major issues, I might end up sticking with 14.04. Or I may see if I can produce both. But to anyone that has to have the latest and greatest most up-to-date version of Linux installed, well, you might be out of luck for support by me.
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
It's not too late to consider going with a hardware/software locked solution. A single-board computer with the software built in and custom OS wouldn't have any compatibility issues because it'd be running exactly what you put on the machine.
 

nissimezra

Member
maximus":20aonz71 said:
Let the cursing begin! After working out a couple of issues just running 16.04.4 as my primary programming OS, and finding a third issue that involves my driver but seems solvable (kernel change that requires conditional compilation), I managed to produce a live cd based on 16.04 and it seems to work, for the most part. But along the way I found some crazy results. First, I found out there is difference between 16.04 and 16.04.2 and up. They kernel version of 16.04 and 16.04.1 is 4.4 which is okay, but 16.04.2 uses kernel version 4.8 which is unable to return ata register results in passthrough mode. And 16.04.4 uses kernel version 4.13 which completely locks up one of my test computers when trying to list drives in passthrough mode. I have not tested the direct modes yet (I think they may be okay), but they are f***ing up the ata passthrough big time, and that was part of the standard, not even special crazy things I do for the direct mode.

Things like this are why programming is not easy, and why people that write software hope to get compensated for it. They need the extra money to pay for hair transplants after they pull all their hair out! So now I have to go back and install plain 16.04 and see if it can work okay to produce a good working live cd. More work to do (and more beer to drink while trying to keep my f***ing sanity). If I find any major issues, I might end up sticking with 14.04. Or I may see if I can produce both. But to anyone that has to have the latest and greatest most up-to-date version of Linux installed, well, you might be out of luck for support by me.

Real world job, I received this hard disk from a computer store.
SMART report failure predicted

ddrescue GUI did not load it, it freezes

https://imgur.com/a/rcUN6GR

So far so good but it keeps slowing down every day.
Now it shows 99.61 percent copied, is this result accurate? if it is 99.6% it's more than enough to extract the data.

The first 97% copied within 30 hours (about) it's very good. Can this result be trusted?
The remaining time is not even near accurate.

I will keep you posted about this job.
 
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