Author Topic: Cloning a IDE hard drive?  (Read 14677 times)

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Offline iXodTopic starter

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Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« on: November 19, 2019, 12:26:35 am »
Someone has asked me to clone an old 3.5-inch IDE hard drive. The computer is in an old CNC mill and is running DOS 6.2 (so says the hand-written sticker on it). The drive is running fine now but the owner is thinking ahead when the old drive will die and wants a clone ready.

The IDE drive is 260 MB (yes, megabytes). I can buy a IDE 250 GB on Amazon for US$16. Is there a conflict using such a "large" drive on such an old DOS version?

What I have to work with is an old Lenovo laptop running W7-Pro, with USB ports. Will this OS/computer work with cloning software?

I see several enclosures/adapters for IDE/USB on Amazon (). Will there be issues using such an adapter?

The datasheet https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ibm/DSAA-3360-DESKSTAR-365MB-3-5-SL-IDE-AT.html]https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ibm/DSAA-3360-DESKSTAR-365MB-3-5-SL-IDE-AT.html]https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ibm/DSAA-3360-DESKSTAR-365MB-3-5-SL-IDE-AT.html] https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ibm/DSAA-3360-DESKSTAR-365MB-3-5-SL-IDE-AT.html]https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ibm/DSAA-3360-DESKSTAR-365MB-3-5-SL-IDE-AT.html]https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ibm/DSAA-3360-DESKSTAR-365MB-3-5-SL-IDE-AT.html]https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ibm/DSAA-3360-DESKSTAR-365MB-3-5-SL-IDE-AT.html I see for the old drive doesn't show a jumper for write-protection. Is there a simple hack to enable WP? It would be a disaster if the software were to write to the source drive...

And finally my question: what software should I use to clone the drive? Recommendations are welcome for a utility that you have personally used.

Thanks.
« Last Edit: November 19, 2019, 01:21:37 am by iXod »
 

Offline ve7xen

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #1 on: November 19, 2019, 01:12:24 am »
The IDE drive is 260 MB (yes, megabytes). I can buy a IDE 250 GB on Amazon for US$16. Is there a conflict using such a "large" drive on such an old DOS version?

The BIOS is the bigger problem, there were various 'large drive' thresholds through the years, which mostly depends on the BIOS. I believe DOS only supported hard disks up to 2GB. In both cases, my recollection is that the disks would still work, just be limited at whatever the capacity limit of either the OS or the BIOS was. That was a long time ago though... My suggestion would be to get a 512MB industrial compact flash (for example) and passive adapter (example) - it is electrically identical to IDE - instead of an old spinning disk that is much larger than needed.

Quote
What I have to work with is an old Lenovo laptop running W7-Pro, with USB ports. Will this OS/computer work with cloning software?

It should, but I'd really suggest booting an OS that is not going to automatically mount a FAT partition that appears. I suggest booting SystemRescueCD and using ddrescue to clone the disk.

Quote
I don't see readily an enclosure or adapter for IDE/USB, yet. Will there be issues using such an adapter?
USB to IDE interfaces are pretty widely available, and should present a block device to the OS, so if you do a blockwise clone of the disk, it will end up identical to the original. Rather than an enclosure I suggest a dongle type device that can connect to IDE40/IDE44/SATA, which will be more useful for future disk cloning activities (example).

If you use CF instead of IDE, using a CF reader should work too.

Quote
https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ibm/DSAA-3360-DESKSTAR-365MB-3-5-SL-IDE-AT.html]The datasheet [url=https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ibm/DSAA-3360-DESKSTAR-365MB-3-5-SL-IDE-AT.html]https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ibm/DSAA-3360-DESKSTAR-365MB-3-5-SL-IDE-AT.html I see for the old drive doesn't show a jumper for write-protection. Is there a simple hack to enable WP? It would be a disaster if the software were to write to the source drive...[/url]

Not possible to do in hardware with IDE (at least not without actually implementing the IDE interface and proxying commands to the disk). This is why I suggest using an OS that will not mount the disk without an explicit command, rather than Windows which opportunistically mounts everything. You can still make mistakes though, so be very careful.

Quote
And finally my question: what software should I use to clone the drive? Recommendations are welcome for a utility that you have personally used.

ddrescue as mentioned above. I suggest initially reading an image file, so there is no risk of overwriting the source disk, and then writing that image to the new disk as a second step. I don't have a suggestion for Windows.
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Offline wilfred

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #2 on: November 19, 2019, 04:20:55 am »
Rather than cloning the drive I would first try to look at just what software is used and attempt to build that on a compact flash card  mounted in an IDE-CF card adapter. They are still available on Ebay. DOS software should be possible to copy over in the same computer currently in use. Then try proving it works OK by booting from the CF card. CF cards should be easily copied using a USB card reader on your laptop if you want an extra copy.

DOS has the ATTRIB command to mark files and directories readonly but I just don't recall if you can mark an entire disk readonly. DOS may not like not being able to update the root directory amongst others for file access times and other system functions.


 

Online Ian.M

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #3 on: November 19, 2019, 04:50:54 am »
This almost certainly isn't going to go well.   An old PC that's been living in a machine shop could fail at the drop of a hat.  Its probably heavily contaminated with general 'spoo' from vaporised cutting fluids, and dust loaded with metal particulates.   Disturb anything inside it, or even transport it any significant distance and the odds of it booting again aren't in your favour.

Pre- PATA/LBA IDE hard drives need the BIOS to be configured (in the CMOS settup) with the correct CHS (cylinders, heads, sectors per track) parameters for the filesystem to be readable.  Some BIOSes and drives supported auto-detection of CHS parameters, but many older and smaller ones did not.  If the CHS parameters don't match exactly the disk image will be scrambled, and may be missing significant quantities of data.   

You *may* get lucky and find a USB PATA adapter that mounts the drive with the correct CHS parameters, but the odds aren't in your favour.  Also, newer motherboards with PATA interfaces often don't support old CHS IDE drives, and if they do, its often auto-detect only, with no guarantee the autodetection will match the CHS drive geometry configured on the old PC.

IMHO the first thing to do is confirm the DOS version, and make a filesystem copy to another legacy box to the suggested CF card in a CF to IDE adapter, pre-formatted, and made bootable with the same DOS version.  This can be done non-invasively if you run MSDOS 6.2's INTERSVR utility on the original system and cable it parallel port to parallel port with a parallel Laplink cable to the target, which needs to boot with an OS between DOS 6.2 and Win98, and the interlnk driver from DOS 6.2 configured in its config.sys, after Intersvr is up and running on the old PC.  Use whatever filesystem clone utility you like - Win95 or higher XCOPY is good enough with the correct switches as long as you don't let it overwrite the critical MSDOS system files on the target disk that make it bootable, as on DOS that old, they need to be at particular locations on the hard disk that XCOPY doesn't know about.

If you are lucky, the copy will boot and run whatever software the CNC system uses.  If you are unlucky, it may have proprietary software that utilises some sort of protection scheme and an exact image copy with the same CHS geometry may be required.   

If it comes down to needing an image copy, and you haven't got lucky with a USB PATA adapter (see above), odds are its going to get very difficult unless you can find a legacy disk clone utility that will boot and run from floppy, and the old PC has a working floppy drive and a second IDE port (usually used for a CDROM), that you can use to attach the target CF drive and adapter.   Due to the contamination issues, expect to have to replace any PATA or floppy ribbon cables you disturb, and have plenty of contact cleaner handy!
« Last Edit: November 19, 2019, 04:54:57 am by Ian.M »
 

Offline maginnovision

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #4 on: November 19, 2019, 04:53:57 am »
When I did this with my Prema multimeter I used a startech pci-e ide controller and dd to copy it to a CF card. It was the only thing I tried that actually worked and let it boot.
 

Offline Daixiwen

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #5 on: November 19, 2019, 08:07:27 am »
I have used Clonezilla with USB adapters in the past without any problem.
But for this use case what I would suggest is to put the system in a virtual machine, using either VMWare or VirtualBox. That way you can run it on newer hardware in case the old PC fails.
 
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Online Ian.M

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #6 on: November 19, 2019, 08:36:16 am »
Virtualisation is not an option if the PC is the actual CNC controller or is closely coupled to it via proprietary interface card(s).  OTOH if all it does is store jobs and send G-code to the real CNC controller over its serial port, then it may well be possible to modernise that and  if its just a bunch of batch scripts and menus + the accumulated job files, it should be possible to rewrite the batch scripting to get it to run natively on a current OS and current hardware.  Been there, done that.

If its a bunch of ISA interface cards and real-time software running them under DOS, there's no guarantee it will even run with a faster processor, so short of complete replacement with a new CNC controller, the only options to improve the odds of keeping it running is to acquire, test and recondition period appropriate hardware, ideally a whole PC of the same model.   If that can be done, swapping the proprietary cards into the replacement PC may be worth it due to the lower risk of a fully reconditioned PSU frying irreplaceable parts, then the original PC can be stripped, cleaned and reconditioned.
« Last Edit: November 19, 2019, 08:37:51 am by Ian.M »
 

Offline Electro Detective

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #7 on: November 19, 2019, 09:06:24 am »

Suggest to make an image of the IDE hard drive ASAP  :scared:  with an older version of Acronis, Ghost, Clonezilla
or any decent program that allows options of what to include in the image, like image boot, image ALL,
and the straight up raw image save of everything as it is on the current drive, warts and all.

Make images in all those flavors, make copies..and once done, take your time as to which way to go next

Me personally, I would buy a handful of good used or NOS exact same 260 MB hard drives at any fair price,
wack them on a PC with IDE sockets,
do the image to drive thing, test them on the CNC machine,
= job done  :-+   and spares to boot (there's a pun there I think  :-//)

 

Offline Berni

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #8 on: November 19, 2019, 10:38:07 am »
Yep any disk cloning utility that can do a direct 1:1 sector copy will do like one ones suggested above. This direct copy is needed so that the boot sectors carry over.

I would at least attempt to put in a old industrial CompactFlash card in an IDE adapter into it with the image and see if the old PC motherboard can boot from it. I would expect the flash card to be more reliable long term in such a harsh enviorment. But id still keep the hard drive in the case, disconnected and sealed in a plastic bag, wrapped in foam as a backup in case bit rot kills the flash memory. As far as i know magnetic storage is still the best kind of long term storage solution.
 

Online Ian.M

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #9 on: November 19, 2019, 11:01:54 am »
An old IDE drive taken out of regular use has a significant chance of failing due to stiction just sitting on the shelf.  A 250MB IDE drive and MSDOS 6.2 would date the system to the mid '90's, so that drive has been running whenever the machine has for the last 25 years. . .

IMHO it would be foolish to trust it as the only backup, and as I mentioned earlier, I'd get as much data off it as possible in-situ.   Even if you have to resort to removing and imaging it, having a copy of the filesystem will be useful if the image turns out to be partially corrupt. 

Once you have the data, either a filesystem copy, or a disk image, that can be archived and backed up as many times as you need for security, together with the tools and information needed to reconstruct a bootable drive from it.

If you have to image it, take a first shot at it with something dumb like DD, that won't force it to retry multiple times, homing and re-seeking to try to read corrupted data, as if the drive is on its last legs, that sort of intensive activity can kill it. 

Imaging in-situ and non-invasively to a file on the hard drive of a second PC is possible if you've got an imaging utility that runs under plain MSDOS, the original system can still be booted from floppy and you make a DOS boot floppy that uses INTERSVR/INTERLNK to mount a volume on the second PC on the original PC for the imaging utility to save to.  Don't expect it to be fast - 80KB/sec is on the high side for a standard parallel port connection, so it could easily take a couple of hours for a 250MB drive.

If you do an insitu filesystem copy, DEBUG (which should be present if it has a 'vanilla' MSDOS 6.x installation) can be used to grab the MBR*, boot sector and partition table, and stuff them in a file for later use if you need to manually patch together a bootable image, but if you've identified the DOS version correctly, you shouldn't need that as its easy enough to use a VM to recreate a bootable drive  from an image of the original MSDOS system disks, using FDISK and FORMAT /S then copy the filesystem contents onto it.  Depending on the VM software, it may well be possible to mount the raw CF card in an IDE adapter on a USB to PATA adapter as IDE drive 0 of the VM. 

However if the old PC BIOS has geometry limitations, it may not boot from a CF card written on a more modern PC and you may have to make a real MSDOS boot floppy with FDISK, FORMAT and INTERSVR on it, and format the CF card on the old PC to make it bootable on the old PC then copy the filesystem back onto it using INTERSVR and INTERLNK + your preferred file management utility.

Its not my first time at this rodeo, and I've had to cope with getting data off a system with no usable floppy drive (and no way to fit one) or CD drive or bootable USB capability, and no way to read the hard drive on another system.  Hint: Laplink 3 is your friend as long as it boots DOS and has a working COM port, as it can be installed onto a DOS system over a serial link!

* Reading outside DOS visible volumes (i.e. with a drive letter) with DEBUG e.g to backup the MBR, is only possible by keying in an assembly language routine to do a raw disk read to RAM and executing it from DEBUG.  Therefore if the hard drive is reasonably healthy or the floppy drive works, you may want to use a better disk sector editor utility that can handle raw disk access. 
« Last Edit: November 19, 2019, 02:38:25 pm by Ian.M »
 

Offline Berni

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #10 on: November 19, 2019, 01:59:56 pm »
An old IDE drive taken out of regular use has a significant chance of failing due to stiction just sitting on the shelf.  A 250MB IDE drive and MSDOS6.2 would date the system to the mid '90's, so that drive has been running whenever the machine has for the last 25 years. . .

IMHO it would be foolish to trust it as the only backup, and as I mentioned earlier, I'd get as much data off it as possible in-situ.   Even if you have to resort to removing and imaging it, having a copy of the filesystem will be useful if the image turns out to be partially corrupt. 

Once you have the data, either a filesystem copy, or a disk image, that can be archived and backed up as many times as you need for security, together with the tools and information needed to reconstruct a bootable drive from it.

Yes i did mean store it on a different hard drive, not the original one.

It doesn't matter if its a SATA drive or something, just something you can use to get the image back off it. But i suppose no harm in leaving the original drive in there too as a just in case, but put a label on it saying its old and worn.

I have a few HP instruments that have a critical boot floppy disk, for that one i made two copies of it, then sealed up the original and one copy in a plastic bag and placed it inside the instrument along with a label on back saying boot disks are inside. The other copy went into the floppy drive to be used as the working disk. Im not sure how long lived floppies are. I wanted to also throw in a SD card with the image, but i couldn't get my USB floppy drive to read these weird non PC format floppies.
 

Offline iXodTopic starter

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #11 on: November 19, 2019, 08:57:06 pm »
Thanks to all responders.

Some points:
* the inside of the mill’s cabinet is spotless. No oil or even dust, so connectors are old but virtually unused.
* I like the idea of CF to replace the HDD. Multiple cloned cards at hand for (infrequent) serial failures.

I’m reluctant to use the PC inside the mill for any monkeying around (cloning or other DOS’ing). So...
I’d like to use modern hardware to do the cloning of the drive into CF memory card. I see someone has installed DOS 6.22 into VirtualBox. This plus a couple of USB adapters (IDE and CF).

Observations and comments welcome.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #12 on: November 19, 2019, 09:17:51 pm »
My friends shop has a bunch of 90s-early 2000s era CNC machines and has replaced the hard drives in most of them with SSDs of some sort, I can find out what they're using. Pretty sure they used a standard PC to clone the drives which were mostly 2.5" IDE.
 

Offline ve7xen

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #13 on: November 19, 2019, 10:03:18 pm »
@Ian.M makes a great point about drive geometry, I had totally forgotten about this, but he's right - a modern PC or USB adapter will likely not work with this old (presumably) CHS disk.

Which makes things trickier. Assuming that's the case you can either try to clone it in situ onto a second IDE device in the same PC (XCOPY or some old disk cloning utility - I only recall Norton Ghost but I'm sure there are others), or via the serial/parallel port using INTERLINK.
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Offline digsys

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #14 on: November 19, 2019, 10:50:20 pm »
I have done / still do many old industrial machine HDD backups - depending on the machine, my usual route is -
Buy 512MB > 2GB HDDs new or smaller ones 2nd hand. Partition off the max size allowed for the machine and forget the rest ie unformatted, sometimes I'm only left with 10-20MB, but who cares :-)
I use Terrabyte Imager and one of those IDE 3.5" / 2.5" / USB / SATA dongles to create a raw image of the HDD. That way I have unlimited copies should I screw up  :-)
I keep an old ISA / PCI motherboard just for this work. I either work in DOS622 or XP3 for all this work.
Then Restore the image to any one of the other drives OR other media IF the machine allows it. I've had some damn temperamental CNC / turret punches etc in the past. One some occasions I've had to trawl aliexpress / alibaba for old exact matches, and never had a failed conversion / backup (touch wood).
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Offline james_s

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #15 on: November 19, 2019, 11:02:08 pm »
Reminds me of my SE/30, it has a 72GB 2.5" SCSI blade server drive, with a pair of 2GB partitions and the rest empty space. 2GB is the partition limit of the OS and is an absurd amount of space. The 2.5" drives were the only ones i could find that didn't sound like a jet engine and they are relatively low power which is good since the power supplies in the compact Macs were never known to have a lot of headroom.

I forgot to mention, CF cards also work well as hard drives in old IDE systems, I've got one in my XT using a XTIDE board.
 

Offline mariush

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #16 on: November 20, 2019, 12:02:57 am »
You can buy IDE flash drives, that are 8 GB or 16 GB in size. Some of these have the 44pin IDE connector (IDE for laptops), but you can use simple adapters to convert them to 40 pin + separate molex connector, the adapters are everywhere...
 
Here's some examples:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Apacer-8GB-44-Pin-IDE-Flash-Memory-NOTEBOOK-DOC-DOM-FLASH/303346711339?hash=item46a0df7b2b:g:5w4AAOSwCNlb7m0o

40 pin : https://www.ebay.com/itm/8-0GB-TRANSCEND-40-PIN-IDE-FLASH-MODULE-PATA-DOM-DISK-ON-MODULE-HDD/153724033136?hash=item23caaa9870:g:gP0AAOSw~K9dzNKD

44 pin https://www.ebay.com/itm/8GB-IDE-44-PIN-SSD-drive-flash-memory-module-thin-client-DE4PA-08GD51AC1DN-B147/333078880717?hash=item4d8d0c61cd:g:2BIAAOSw9bpcaWHQ

another 40 pin : https://www.ebay.com/itm/8GB-LeiDisk-Industrial-DOM-IDE-flash-Disk-On-Module-40pin-with-cable/153573398968?hash=item23c1b019b8:g:aagAAOSwUb5bkkBb

and another same model as above link : https://www.ebay.com/itm/Top-Sale-8GB-Disk-On-Module-40pin-IDE-Flash-Disk-Industrial-DOM-for-Soft-Route/293191117530?hash=item44438d6ada:g:H6YAAOSwoMddV6R9

Such old computers may have problems reading big drives. I remember there was a problem with drives bigger than around 33 GB, but even before that DOS couldn't use drives bigger than around 8.5 GB

See https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html

When 160GB and higher drives appeared I remember they had a jumper making them show up as 127 under 137 GB, to work on computers that couldn't handle more than that.... that was another limitation.

As for making a disk image of the original drive, I would install freeDos on one of these 8 GB drives (make a 512 MB - 1 GB FAT 12 or something like that partition) and boot from it (if the bios supports booting from 2nd ide drive).
Maybe create a second partition in which you'd save the disk image file as it's created.

Then simply use some dos disk imaging tool to make the drive disk image.

For example, see : http://www.partition-recovery.com/download.htm
 
or active disk for dos (scroll down for free dos version) : https://www.lsoft.net/diskimage.aspx

When done, remove the drive from the dos computer, connect it to another computer (using a ide to sata adapter or whatever)

Alternatively, you could probably use a null modem cable to sloooowly transfer the image to another computer that has a serial port.
See interlink : http://www.pcxt-micro.com/dos-interlink.html or File Maven: https://www.briggsoft.com/fmdos.htm
 
« Last Edit: November 20, 2019, 12:09:32 am by mariush »
 

Offline Rasz

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #17 on: November 20, 2019, 02:27:27 pm »
about bios size limit, by far the best guide on the internet:
size barriers https://web.archive.org/web/20130930200050fw_/http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/size.htm
bios translation https://web.archive.org/web/20130521200656fw_/http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/modes.htm
sadly only archive.org version, most likely domain lapsed and now its a SEO/amazon affiliates spam mill under original address :(
quick and dirty guide http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/bioslim.htm

CHS mapping was standardized and shouldnt be a problem between motherboards, but USB-PATA converters are another story. Some outright refuse to work with pre LBA drives, others screw mapping.

Most important thing: Make triple sure which drive is the source when making a clone :)
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Offline Psi

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #18 on: November 20, 2019, 02:31:47 pm »
+1 for compact flash.
You can still get them in sizes that the bios will recognize.

One thing to be aware of with CF is that that some adapters re-purpose the key pin on the IDE plug/connector.
This means there is a pin where normally there wouldn't be. So any IDE cable that has a plug in this pin slot may not work for you.
You may need to source an IDE cable that does not have the pin plugged.
Should be easy to find, just something to be aware of.
You could also drill out the plug.

Here's an example of the pin plug i mean. You can see it in the center of the connector.
« Last Edit: November 20, 2019, 02:49:22 pm by Psi »
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Online Ian.M

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #19 on: November 20, 2019, 02:54:34 pm »
CHS mapping was standardized and shouldn't be a problem between motherboards
First, thanks for the valuable links.

Although CHS mapping was supposed to be standardized, a few really old PC BIOSes didn't always support the full number of heads or sectors (usually due to an off-by-one error in limit checking code or similar bugs)  and more had limited drive types available to choose from with preset CHS parameters.  If you encounter a PC that has one of these issues that's been fitted with a newer hard drive than was anticipated at the time its BIOS was built, its quite likely to have been configured to use less than the full capacity of the drive and if the drive is autoconfigured in another PC with normal bug-free CHS support, or configured manually according to the CHS parameters on its label, you'll get blocks of garbage data interspersed with the real data.   :-[  |O
 

Offline granzeier

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #20 on: November 21, 2019, 01:45:47 pm »
Another possibility is to use an external tape drive. I have a couple QIC-80 drives (one Conner, and one BackPack) which plug into the parallel printer port. These would come with a tape utility which gets copied onto a bootable floppy. If your CNC system uses less than 100MB, then you could also use a Zip drive - or use the Zip250 drive. If you make the boot floppy from the system that you are backing up, then it is simple.

You boot from the floppy and run the utility, which then copies the entire disk - without regard to cylinders, heads or sectors. When you need to restore, you just put a new hard drive into the computer (or another,) format it to boot to the version of DOS that was on the old drive, and use the utility to restore the system. It even works if the new drive is a totally different size, or geometry.

Does anyone here know if dd can read a drive (if=) and not do a complete copy, but just the data? Then the image could be restored onto a different-sized drive. All of the imaging that I have done with dd copies the entire disk, partitions and all, and can only be restored to a drive of exactly the same size (or bigger - but then you only have access to the original amount of space.)
 

Offline Berni

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #21 on: November 21, 2019, 03:42:27 pm »
You can tell dd how much you want to copy.

But in general you would want to copy the whole thing so that if you copy it back on any compatible hard drive of sufficient size it will work. The first sectors around the partition table are important to make it boot correctly. But if you want to expand it to the full size of the disk all you have to do is also install gparted in linux. This tool lets you resize the existing partition to span it out while keeping everything else intact so it should still boot correctly.
 

Online SiliconWizard

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #22 on: November 21, 2019, 04:10:25 pm »
Reminds me of my SE/30, it has a 72GB 2.5" SCSI blade server drive, with a pair of 2GB partitions and the rest empty space. 2GB is the partition limit of the OS and is an absurd amount of space. The 2.5" drives were the only ones i could find that didn't sound like a jet engine and they are relatively low power which is good since the power supplies in the compact Macs were never known to have a lot of headroom.

These days, you can also find SCSI2SD boards that allow the use of SD cards. Eg: https://store.inertialcomputing.com/SCSI2SD-v6-p/scsi2sd-v6-revf.htm
Have you ever tried? I have heard of mixed results using them in old Macs.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #23 on: November 21, 2019, 09:00:34 pm »
Yes I built a couple of SCSI2SD boards and they do work, but I haven't had any reason to mess with the SE/30. The 2.5" server drive works, it's nearly silent and it's all set up. If it ever fails I'll probably go the SD route but for now it ain't broke so I'm not gonna fix it.
 

Offline granzeier

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Re: Cloning a IDE hard drive?
« Reply #24 on: November 23, 2019, 11:38:03 am »
install gparted in linux. This tool lets you resize the existing partition to span it out while keeping everything else intact so it should still boot correctly.
Thanks, I use gparted quite often - I also have it on my emergency boot thumb drive. But I had forgotten about its ability to resize partitions. This will be a bit more awkward than the old tape drive programs, but it should do the job.
 


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