[Bug-ddrescue] Possible bug with ddrescue 1.7 and later.

[Andrew Stuart]

Hi, first let me start by saying good job. Your software has been very 
helpful in recovering a few bad hdds.

I started experiencing problems with *really* bad drives after the 1.7 
release. Although I have to admit, I have not gone back to 1.6 to prove 
this was the case, are the log files compatible between these two versions?

I am using FreeBSD 7.0, and ddrescue 1.8. Everything works fine, up 
until the hdd gives up the ghost and disappears. At this point ddrescue 
does not stop, but continues trying to copy data, while marking it as 
bad sectors, up to several hundred TB's of data before stopped, if you 
don't keep an eye on it.

In this case the recovery job was running for three days, when the hdd 
disappeared about 4am in the morning on a sunday, while no one was around.

After powering down the machine and letting the hdd rest for a while, 
trying to restart the recovery seemingly sits there doing nothing, when 
using the log that believes its has achieved 200+TB's of data/errors.

To make sure I am clear, when I say the drive disappeared, the dmesg log 
reports the drive disconnected or some such, and /dev/ad4 (in this 
instance) no longer exists.

Any help / Resolution would be greatly appreciated. At this time I am 
currently running it again hoping that no new harm has come to the 
drive, and have a script setup to keep checkpoints of the log, so that I 
can hopefully roll back to a good one if it should fail in my absence 
again.

-Andrew