Feature Suggestion

[fig]

Hi,

I am an owner of DP (just bought it not too long ago to have it in my toolkit, though I have never *thank god* had to use it yet).

My last real bad disk disaster involved a disk that was not recognized by the BIOS any more.

Therefore I would like to suggest as a new feature the ability of DP to access the disk controller directly without going through the BIOS.

Then it would allow DP to clone drives that have partialy corrupted FW or bad 1st sectors etc and widen DPs usefullness considerably.

I enjoy as always visiting your forum and by just reading I learn a lot from your expert advice, great manuals and documentation and extremely well made and capable programs (and I have used a LOT of discovery software over the last 25 years).

Thanks.

Fig

[Joep]

Hello,

Well, there are competetive products that do but it is a bit pointless for cases you describe - I have never heard of those tools being successfull if the disk wasn't properly detected by the BIOS. If the BIOS does not pick up the disk due to for example corrupt firmware, DiskPatch will not be able to anything with the disk either. To work around this you would need exact disk model and revision and then load firmware/microcode your self, and you'd need a whole library of such codes. Accessing the hard disk directly is possible, but it will not help you if a properly functioning BIOS can't detect a disk.

[fig]

Sorry if I need to correct your statement: I was able to clone a disk that had the problems described and was not recognized in BIOS with another product.

If FW is completely corrupted, you are right, of course.

But it is possible that FW is only PARTIALLY corrupted so that the BIOS does not recognize the drive however data can still be read directly through the controller.

Just like you can have one file in windows corrupted but still have a partially functioning OS.

From comments at other sites, this seems to be quite a common problem with HDs.

Without being able to talk to the controller directly however, your only reply to problems of such a nature can be "Sorry DP cannot help you in this situation." without even taking the next step (which would be talking to the disk controller directly to see if data is still accessible for a clone).

Therefore I think my suggestion is quite valid, though of course I realize that adding this feature would be quite a bit of programming work.

Regards,

Fig

[Joep]

Hello,

No need to be sorry, I do not mind having this discussion ... Well, then that's the first time I heard someone was able to do that. Was that with Mediatools or Deepspar imager? And yes, the problem is quite common. And yes, our answer to this at this point is, DiskPatch can not help you with that.

You are correct, this is a bit of work, and also it probably also means additional load on support as we would be entering the area of very sick, instable and maybe even terminal disks.

DiskPatch was originally designed for partition table and boot sector repair only, it was initially called MBR-Rescue. Later on, DiskPatch was already called DiskPatch, a cloning feature was added to address the fact that we were sometimes unable to scan or repair disks due to unreadable sectors. And we still 'advertise' the cloning feature as such.

If we would ever implement direct disk access then this would be in a dedicated disk cloner. Problem with such a product is that it's hard to make it 'trial'. These are also things we need to take in consideration. We're not in the business to become rich, but we do depend on it for an income.

It does not mean that we consider the disk clone 'done', we're still working on improving it. But improvements we're considering right now do not include direct disk access.

[fig]

>Was that with Mediatools or Deepspar imager?

You forgot copyr.dma and its bigger brother HD Duplicator, which also have this ability.

>DiskPatch was originally designed for partition table and boot sector repair only, it was initially called >MBR-Rescue. Later on, DiskPatch was already called DiskPatch, a cloning feature was added to address >the fact that we were sometimes unable to scan or repair disks due to unreadable sectors. And we still >'advertise' the cloning feature as such.

Thank you for filling me in on the history of this product. I always looked at DP primarily as a cloning product, so this perspective is most informative.

I am a very cautious person and would therefore be hesitant to attempt any repair unless I first had a clone or recent backups available.

Repair tools are abundantly available, good cloning tools are not. That's why I have always appreciated your excellent DP product a lot, offering professional solutions like adjustable skipping of bad sectors and reverse cloning coupled with your superior and knowledgeable tech support right here in the forum. I read it off and on just to learn about HD recovery and always leave with some additional insight.

The market also seems to go more and more towards windows based tools as your company has also acknowledged in its product line-up. Of course for some things the software needs direct disk access and that is difficult to do safely in windows.

Therefore I think there is a market for another disk cloning tool with direct controller access at a reasonable price, and I don't think it needs to be entirely cloning as some of the other tools mentioned also have a similar breadth of features as DP has.

There also seems to be another relatively open niche for products that do non destructive disk repair like Spinrite and HD Regenerator claim to do. DP also does do some R/W stuff to force sector allocation, but I believe Spinrite (when used prudently) can bypass HD FW automatic sector reallocation and try to recover the bad sector in vitro. Maybe that would also be a nice added feature for DP too.

>Problem with such a product is that it's hard to make it 'trial'. These are also things we need to take in >consideration. We're not in the business to become rich, but we do depend on it for an income.

Of course you deserve to become rich, because you made a great product and helped a lot of people! 

You can make a disc clone product demo by allowing the user to check if the drive is detected. Anything else would not be advisable anyway, because a user should not use a dying drive any more than absolutely necessary.

Thanks for your reply. Keep up your good work! 

Regards,

Fig

[Joep]

Hello,

You are right, I forgot those. And there maybe even a few more, funny how those sites are all rather hard to find, hard to navigate etc.. Almost is as if they don't want to be found ...

Yes, we regard DiskPatch a repair tool mainly and cloning is to facilitate repairs. Still the disk clone is something that has our attention and we want it to be as good as possible while using our method of disk access which is through BIOS right now. As you mention, we also want people to be able to clone a disk prior to making repairs as a safety measure. And I agree, if the focus would be on bad disks, bypassing the BIOS would be the way to go.

yes, Spinrite ... I don't know what to think of it, I own a copy. I primarely regard a disk diagnostic tool but I never have the time to take a disk offline that long. From what I understand from various resources, I doubt there's much added value in Spinrite and HD Regenerator (the latter I have never used). The only repairs I have seen Spinrite do could have been done with any other tool that write a pattern to a sector for force reallocation. Original sector contents were not recovered in those cases. And I am not sure if I like the idea of statistical analysis to 'guess' what's supposed to be in a damaged sector. You can never be sure if it guessed right, and you can never be sure of the consquenses. I'd rather have, like we do with DiskPatch, a sector to have known-bad contents than the high degree of uncertainty Spinrite leaves you with.

'Tricks' employed to access a flaky sector are already employed by modern hard disks themselves. The one trick that can actually work, reading backwards, does not appear to be employed by Spinrite, but I maybe wrong. maybe that's what it actually does when it approaches the sector from a 'different angle'. Hard to see/read what it does through all marketing semi-techno talk.

One can wonder if the patterns utilized by Spinrite and DPO's HDD Regenerator are of any use, even if accessing disks bypassing the BIOS leaves several 'layers' you have no influence on. What we write to a disk goes through several other layers of hashing, encoding, compressing etc. before it's actually stored on the magnetic platters. So writing 0101010101 to a disk may result in something completely different being written. Also, a disk sector being 'bad' may not have to do anything with the actual data being written to a sector while this the only portions you can manipulate. A sector is actually a bit more that the 512 bytes we get to see. Yet, it appears patterns, and sequences of patterns that are supposedly doing the magic. There's isn't much else than using 'optimized' patterns one can do to 'revitalize' or do 'magnetic reversal' in the end. So, I am a bit sceptical. It is my estimation that optimized patterns don't offer any added value over simply dumping zeros to a sector and make the disk reallocate it. To be able to do 'magnetic reversal' you'd have to access the disk at an even lower level.

It'd be rather easy to make DiskPatch do what Spinrite does when doing the read/write surface scan but I doubt it will have a lot of added value.

Please don't get me wrong, I do appreciate your comments and suggestions!