HDDSuperClone vs ddrescue

Sun Oct 15, 2017 12:46 pm

It would also be nice if it could work with NVMe devices such as these Apple and M.2 SSDs. ddrescue does them just fine, as they rarely ever have bad sectors. But, a way to do it via GUI would be nice.

Perhaps, just as a thought, when hddsuperclone can't read from a particular device, it could automatically queue up ddrescue with the appropriate command and monitor it still via the GUI.

maximus · Sun Oct 15, 2017 1:13 pm

Jared wrote:Source of the post It would also be nice if it could work with NVMe devices such as these Apple and M.2 SSDs. ddrescue does them just fine, as they rarely ever have bad sectors. But, a way to do it via GUI would be nice.

Perhaps, just as a thought, when hddsuperclone can't read from a particular device, it could automatically queue up ddrescue with the appropriate command and monitor it still via the GUI.

How do those devices show up in Linux? Why can't HDDSuperClone work with them? It should be able to work with them in SCSI passthrough mode, as long as they show up as such a device.

Edit: If they do show up, what sector size do they report?

Sun Oct 15, 2017 1:51 pm

The one I just did showed up as /dev/nvme0n1 (I think that was the partition address). If I recall I tried to used HDDSuperClone GUI, but the device didn't even appear in the list of drives. Perhaps from command line I could have tried to force the issue, but I just used ddrescue instead. Drive was a PCIe SSD from a macbook that I put into the PCIe slot via an adapter board.

maximus · Sun Oct 15, 2017 3:21 pm

If it shows up as /dev/nvme0n1 then HDDSuperClone can't handle it, at least not yet. I was trying to get a release out this weekend, but I keep finding more quirks to take care of. So I guess I might as well hold off on the release and work on adding the "normal" read, although I am not sure if it will naturally list the nvme devices though...

maximus · Sun Oct 15, 2017 9:17 pm

What command do you use to list available drives that shows /dev/nvme0n1?

Sun Oct 15, 2017 9:30 pm

hwinfo --short

That's the command I most often use. I think there's a way to just list the data storage devices, but I can't remember what it is.

That, or I just open up Gparted for a second and see the address.

Sun Oct 15, 2017 9:32 pm

Try this one:

Code: Select all

hwinfo --block --short

That should return a pretty concise list which includes all block storage devices.

You just might have to add hwinfo as a dependency since not all distros include it.

maximus · Sun Oct 15, 2017 9:56 pm

Yeah, hwinfo does not appear to be a standard in Linux. How about the following command, does this work? It is supposed to list all block devices.

lsblk

Mon Oct 16, 2017 9:19 am

I'm not sure if that SSD is even still here, and I'm tied up with a RAID recovery today. I'll have to investigate another time.

maximus · Mon Oct 16, 2017 6:07 pm

In the end it is not critical, as from what I can tell it could still be chosen manually. Currently when choosing a drive as the target it will only list devices that are in the form of /dev/sdx, but if you choose an image as the target you can navigate to /dev and choose any device, although it obviously must be something that can be written to with standard generic write commands. The same would apply to a source.