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[20120114]
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g4u 2.5beta1 supports handling of partition tables and bad disk sectors
After some absence (job-related) and technical problems
(building of NetBSD failing for me from Mac OS X),
I'm very happy to release a beta version of g4u
with some long-overdue changes. Those include being
able to backup/restore the MBR, which includes the
partition table - needed when recovering single partitions
to a new disk. Also, the various commands reading disks
are now adjusted to not abort when a disk sector cannot
be used. Instead, the bad bytes are skipped and the
rest of the disk is recovered. Please give me feedback on
this feature as I didn't have a bad disk to test this!
Other news include a command to wipe a disk by completely
overwriting it with 0-bytes (once).
Last, command line editing was enabled - finally!
Remember that this is a test release, so your feedback
is wanted - either to me in person, or to the
g4u-help mailing list. Thanks!
Here's a full list of changes:
- New commands "uploadmbr" and "slurpmbr" to backup and restore the master
boot record, which includes the partition table. Required to restore a
partition to an empty disk.
- New command "copymbr" to copy the MBR from one disk to another, similar
to "copydisk"
- New command "wipedisk" to write the disk full with 0-bytes once from
start (sector 0) to end (last sector)
- Enable command line history/editing by forcing /bin/sh to be built
without -DSMALL (ugly hack... there be lots of dragons!)
- When setting up a fresh compile tree, g4u patches are now applied
automagically without aborting the build
- Error detection was now enabled in the dd(1) command, which is the core
of g4u (surprise!). With that, disks with broken/unreadable sectors
should now be copied, skipping the unreadable sectors and copying the
rest. This affects a number of programs: copydisk, copypart, uploaddisk,
uploadpart. BEWARE: I wasn't able to actually test this as I do not have
a disk with bad sectors here. Please report back your experiences!!!
- Make this build with NetBSD-current sources as of 2012-01-12
- New drivers added to the kernel:
- RDC PMX-1000 IDE controllers
- Intel SCH IDE controllers
- TOSHIBA PICCOLO controllers
- Attansic/Atheros L1C/L2C Ethernet
- Broadcom BCM43xx wireless
- Agere/LSI ET1310/ET1301 Gigabit Ethernet
- RDC R6040 10/100 Ethernet
- USB LCDs and USB-VGA adaptors, e.g.:
- DisplayLink DL-1x0/1x5
- Option N.V. Wireless USB WAN modems
- Microsoft RNDIS specifications USB ethernet
- Atheros AR9001U USB Wifi
- Intersil PrismGT USB Wifi
- Virtio PCI, memory balloon, disk & network devices
- ... and many more that slipped past QA
- ... and any driver updates, optimizations and bug fixes and other
enhancements from NetBSD-current
Get g4u 2.5beta1:
[Tags: g4u]
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