[Bug-ddrescue] New passthrough patch available for testing - testers wanted

[Scott Dwyer]

Wanted: A few select people to test my latest ddrescue passthrough patch 
for 1.21-pre1. Ideally you would already be familiar with my patch, 
which is found at:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ddrutility/files/ddrescue%20patches/passthrough%20patch/

The new patch for 1.21-pre1 is currently considered beta and can be 
found in the older_and_testing folder.

Requirements: You must have a drive or drives that will fault out (give 
abnormal errors with my patch, and require power cycling the drive), and 
be willing to spend a little time to perform some tests on one or more 
of those drives. If possible the tests should be performed on drives 
that have already been recovered, so that there is no chance of losing 
someone’s data. While I have tested the patch for mapfile and data 
integrity, there could always be the chance it could do something it 
shouldn’t when it hits an abnormal error. It would be very helpful if 
you were familiar with scripting and how to know the exit code of ddrescue.

Purpose: I need to test the ability of my patch to process different 
types of errors other than the normal read error. I currently do not 
have any drives that I can do this with. I am trying to make it so it 
knows when a drive has a device fault condition which requires a power 
cycle so it will exit, and also process other abnormal errors but allow 
the recovery to continue with a user defined limitation count. It will 
also give more specific exit codes that can be useful for scripting.

 I need the patch tested in both SCSI and ATA passthrough modes on 
drives that will give what I call abnormal errors (such as command 
aborted), and also go into device fault (hardware error) where the drive 
needs to be power cycled. I need to know if the --mark-abnormal option 
works like it is supposed to (read the readme included with the patch). 
The tests only need to be performed for as long as it takes to get these 
results, and on an area of the drive that will produce the results.

Also, if anyone has any drives that fit this description and would be 
able and willing to donate them to me I would be very grateful. And by 
donate I mean you would have to pay the shipping cost to send it to me. 
Please make sure you are not violating any rights or wishes of the 
previous owner of the drive before considering this.

Please email responses to: address@hidden
If you plan on testing, please let me know so that I can email you if I 
make any changes and update the patch. Otherwise you would not know 
unless you checked the website every day to see if I posted a newer version.

I have been very busy lately so there may be a delay in my responses. I 
will also understand delays in testing results as you may also be busy 
with other things.

Thanks,

Scott