DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: dd_rescue and dd_rhelp



Damn Small Linux would be much more useful as a rescue disk if it included GNU ddrescue, which is like dd except that it can copy data from failing hard drives.

    http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

(Note that GNU ddrescue is an order of magnitude smaller than Garloff's old dd_rescue program accoding to http://freshmeat.net/projects/addrescue/), which was already pretty small, so it shouldn't be too hard to fit on the DSL disk.

--B
I just compiled GNU ddrescue-1.0 on my DSL box and it came out to 50KiB. This is without optimizing for size or stripping the executable. Given the great utility of this program, I think it should definitely be included on the default Damn Small Linux Box.

--B

P.S. Yes, the title of my post is mistakenly "dd_rescue" instead of "ddrescue". They're different projects; oops.
dd*rescue is a nice tool that should at a minimum be made into a myDSL extension package and submitted to the repository.

However, DSL doesn't even have "dd" installed, nevermind "dd*rescue".

I would rather have GNU "dd" installed by default, or at the minimum, have a recompiled busybox that includes support for files and block devices that are larger than 2GB

Just my $0.02
DSL does has dd. It is at /bin/dd. It is a busybox applet just like so many other space saving features that busybox provides.
My original statement was unclear.

It should read:

ddrescue or dd_rescue is nice, but it should not be added to the base distro because the base distro does not have the regular "GNU dd" command installed by default.

To me, it makes little sense why you would have a specialized recovery tool (ddrescue) for damaged disk drives as part of the base livecd when the original base tool (GNU dd) is not included in the base livecd in order to save space.

ddrescue, or even GNU dd, is not needed in the base distro.

However, it would be nice if someone could recompile the busybox version of "dd" so that it can support disks/partitions/blockdevices that are larger than 2GB

Someone else (I think it was friedgold) earlier mentioned that is it possible to compile busybox to include largefile support to eliminate the 2GB limit.
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