humaxrw offset start

Patrick Quick

New Member
Is there a way to start reading a file part-way through with humaxrw?

I'm retrieving recordings from a failing disk. Each time it gets a different distance through the recording before failing (so it's the disk failing rather than a corrupt recording). By re-trying, I can occasionally get a whole recording, but if I could start part-way through I could gain a bit more each time I tried and eventually get a whole recording.

If the source code is available I'd be happy to try editing it myself - should be an easy option to add!
I'm thinking of a command option -o:
humaxrw 3: -r-n- g -o 1270194176 28
to read file 28, which I have already managed to get just over 1GB.

P.S. the disk is getting worse and worse, so I'm getting lower and lower success rates.
 
Since this sounds like a one off, I don't really want to go there.

Could you not use Seatools or smartctl/hdparm to get the disk to remap the bad sectors. It should then read the disk without falling over (unless the FAT area is damaged in which case it is game over).
 
Hi xyz321.
Thanks for responding.
Since posting this request, I've simply left the disk attached to my main computer and I've kept trying to read another recording or two each time I went to it, and now it's eventually read all the recordings.
The problem doesn't seem to be bad sectors as it will fail to read a recording one time and then succeed the next, and it failed at different places each attempt. That's why I thought it would be useful to be able to start part-way through, so every time I read a bit of a recording, I could add it to what had already been read, rather than starting from scratch each time and hoping it would hold together until the end of the file.
As I said, the immediate problem is now over and I've scrapped the disk as it couldn't even be re-formatted successfully.
 
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