A while ago, the 2.5" HDD in my Amiga 1200 started acting weird: strange noises, not willing to boot etc. I was considering to make a backup, which in my case means 3.5" floppies, as I don't own a 40+ MB PCMCIA memory card or other means. It returned to normal again, and I forgot about it.
Now, I was trying to boot it again. Only a soft whirring sound, and for the first time since I acquired the computer, the purple boot-up animation screen came. Pressing both mouse buttons for boot options told that the HDD was not recognized anymore. Help!
After opening the computer, and juggling the hard disk slightly, I got it to operate again, but I'm not so sure it will last. In the drawer, I have a larger (127 MB) hard disk I could replace it with, but the IDE chain only allows for one hard disk. Maybe I could borrow my boss' newly bought USB cabinet for external 2.5" disks, and hope that there is a way for a Windows/Linux PC to at least read the contents of an Amiga formatted hard drive as a disk image.
Amiga: (Almost) dead hard disk
Moderator: Moderators
Amiga: (Almost) dead hard disk
Anders Carlsson
Hm. I just tested the other drive, now when I had the option. It has some sort of AmigaOS installed, and is divied into two equally large partitions. It also makes even more soughing noise than the smaller drive does when it works.
Small disk = Conner CP-2064, 40 MB
Large disk = Seagate ST-9145AG, 127 MB
New disk = 20 GB or more..
Hmm, Internet thinks the Conner is a 64 MB 3.5" drive.. odd. Or at least that it is a 64 MB 2.5" drive. I guess I may have some disk tools which could tell me if part of the surface is unused.
Small disk = Conner CP-2064, 40 MB
Large disk = Seagate ST-9145AG, 127 MB
New disk = 20 GB or more..
Hmm, Internet thinks the Conner is a 64 MB 3.5" drive.. odd. Or at least that it is a 64 MB 2.5" drive. I guess I may have some disk tools which could tell me if part of the surface is unused.
Anders Carlsson
Re: Amiga: (Almost) dead hard disk
Ouch! I feel your pain.carlsson wrote:A while ago, the 2.5" HDD in my Amiga 1200 started acting weird: strange noises, not willing to boot etc. I was considering to make a backup, which in my case means 3.5" floppies, as I don't own a 40+ MB PCMCIA memory card or other means. It returned to normal again, and I forgot about it.
Now, I was trying to boot it again. Only a soft whirring sound, and for the first time since I acquired the computer, the purple boot-up animation screen came. Pressing both mouse buttons for boot options told that the HDD was not recognized anymore. Help!
Hard disk crashes are really terrible stuff! A tip here is: Don't power up the disk again unless you are about to clone it! Harddisks are more prone to failure during power up/power down. I believe that Linux will be able to read your data as it includes the Amiga Filesystem by default. The only issue could be if the Amiga addresses the sectors in some alien way, but I think you will be fine.carlsson wrote:After opening the computer, and juggling the hard disk slightly, I got it to operate again, but I'm not so sure it will last. In the drawer, I have a larger (127 MB) hard disk I could replace it with, but the IDE chain only allows for one hard disk. Maybe I could borrow my boss' newly bought USB cabinet for external 2.5" disks, and hope that there is a way for a Windows/Linux PC to at least read the contents of an Amiga formatted hard drive as a disk image.
What you do is:
- Connect your Amiga disk to a regular PC with linux on it. (preferably to the second IDE-channel)
- Power the system, and boot into linux.
- now as root do: (you will have to change /dev/hdc to be the device your Amiga-disk appears as)
Be careful here! dd is a very dangerous command. If you accidentally swap if and of, you will dump junk data onto your disk.
This will do a raw sector dump of your whole disk, twice, and then compare the results to see that they are equal.Code: Select all
$ dd if=/dev/hdc of=amiga1.raw bs=512 $ dd if=/dev/hdc of=amiga2.raw bs=512 $ diff amiga1.raw amiga2.raw $ - If you had problems in the previous step, repeat until you get two equal dumps.
- Now you actually have a backup of your disk, you may mount it using the loopback filesystem in linux, or use adfopus, unADF or adfview to extract the contents of the disk.
I used this procedure to backup the SCSI-disks in my A3000 a while back and it worked fine, but no guarantees!
Hope this helps!
I'll try. Maybe I can buy an 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter (about 70 SEK, if I still can get hold of one) and have a permanent rescue. I probably should get a cheap, 2nd hand SCSI card too one day. I'll let the disk rest now. When it was running, from time to time a metal zzing sound could be heard, which I suppose is a Bad Omen.
Anders Carlsson
The most important thing is that you get all the data out of your disk as soon as possible. Once you have a raw dump, you can always find a way to parse it.carlsson wrote:I'll try. Maybe I can buy an 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter (about 70 SEK, if I still can get hold of one) and have a permanent rescue. I probably should get a cheap, 2nd hand SCSI card too one day. I'll let the disk rest now. When it was running, from time to time a metal zzing sound could be heard, which I suppose is a Bad Omen.
The dumps I made from my SCSI disks boot up just fine in WinUAE for example. Pretty cool!
By default, you can connect two IDE drives to the internal IDE interface.
Look here: http://www.ggsdata.se
He has a couple of different cables, for example
2.5"->2.5"+3.5" for 58kr...
I bought an IDE inteface from him some years ago, allowing three 3.5" units and one 2.5". Maybe he still has that one too.... It's called ELBOX 4xEIDE'99
/Anders
Look here: http://www.ggsdata.se
He has a couple of different cables, for example
2.5"->2.5"+3.5" for 58kr...
I bought an IDE inteface from him some years ago, allowing three 3.5" units and one 2.5". Maybe he still has that one too.... It's called ELBOX 4xEIDE'99
/Anders
PRG Starter - a VICE helper / Vic Software (Boray Gammon, SD2IEC music player, Vic Disk Menu, Tribbles, Mega Omega, How Many 8K etc.)
That depends. There are many different amiga power supplys with different ratings. The one I got with my A1200 actually says "A600" on it... Anyway, you would need a "strömtjuv" for that, for example from the diskdrive's power cable. Or you can just take the power supply from any old PC to power the 3.5" drive. That's what I do....
/Anders
/Anders
PRG Starter - a VICE helper / Vic Software (Boray Gammon, SD2IEC music player, Vic Disk Menu, Tribbles, Mega Omega, How Many 8K etc.)
Update: Now I have purchased the 2.5" adapter. Because of the nice weather and on pure luck, I took the bike to the huge shopping places in the end of Västerås. First I had a look at Computer City but they did not seem to have much of a selection at all. Then I went to the newly opened PC City (does anyone see the pattern?), which seems to be a really good computer supermarket, both in terms of selection and prices. You may find items even cheaper through mail order, but if I'm buying some stuff in the future, I'll definitely have a look there.
Anyway, PC City sold this adapter for a shelf price of 49 SEK, which is very good compared to the mail order which are around 60-70 SEK plus shipping, if not more. The next surprise came when I went to pay; the price in the computer system was 34 SEK! One should not complain when items are cheaper than they were supposed to be. I still haven't had time to plug it in, and I'll pick up a spare IDE cable first, so maybe I'll make a recovery attempt by the weekend.
It was quite funny that the store had one security guard watching the door and cashier (you seldom see them that prominent here), one girl in the cashier's office, about ten customers waiting to pay, a supervisor girl who came to help the other girl how to run the cashier and pack the purchased items into bags and of course a dozen salespeople running around like hens. They have a second cashier's office, so it had made more sense if one of the salespeople or even the supervisor could have opened it to improve the customer flow. The two girls also were busy chatting with the security guard about tonight's party, despite a long line of customers.
Västerås is really turning into a shopping metropolis by Swedish standards. Almost every big and medium chain in any profession open a store here, in a 130,000 people city! Some are located in the centre, the other in one of two shopping places on each end of the city. I have one shopping place on only 5 minute bicycle distance, and it is the one meant to expand by 200-300% over the next few years. We'll see what happens. There is competition from a newly opened huge shopping place in Eskilstuna across the lake, 45 km away, but most of the chains are the same in both cities.
Anyway, PC City sold this adapter for a shelf price of 49 SEK, which is very good compared to the mail order which are around 60-70 SEK plus shipping, if not more. The next surprise came when I went to pay; the price in the computer system was 34 SEK! One should not complain when items are cheaper than they were supposed to be. I still haven't had time to plug it in, and I'll pick up a spare IDE cable first, so maybe I'll make a recovery attempt by the weekend.
It was quite funny that the store had one security guard watching the door and cashier (you seldom see them that prominent here), one girl in the cashier's office, about ten customers waiting to pay, a supervisor girl who came to help the other girl how to run the cashier and pack the purchased items into bags and of course a dozen salespeople running around like hens. They have a second cashier's office, so it had made more sense if one of the salespeople or even the supervisor could have opened it to improve the customer flow. The two girls also were busy chatting with the security guard about tonight's party, despite a long line of customers.
Västerås is really turning into a shopping metropolis by Swedish standards. Almost every big and medium chain in any profession open a store here, in a 130,000 people city! Some are located in the centre, the other in one of two shopping places on each end of the city. I have one shopping place on only 5 minute bicycle distance, and it is the one meant to expand by 200-300% over the next few years. We'll see what happens. There is competition from a newly opened huge shopping place in Eskilstuna across the lake, 45 km away, but most of the chains are the same in both cities.
Anders Carlsson
The disk has two partitions, of which both are FFS, maybe with the directory cache (?) addition. Therefore, I had to duplicate the disk with dd once for each partition in order to mount them into the file system:
dd if=/dev/hdc1 of=workbench.raw bs=512
Then I mounted it with:
mount workbench.raw /mnt -t affs -o loop
It took a while to figure out this, in particular as there was some interference from already mounted partitions.
By the way, did you know that if the power connector on the Amiga is not properly plugged in, everything except for the sound will work? Or maybe I'm making false assumptions, but the sound disappered until I reseated the power connector.
dd if=/dev/hdc1 of=workbench.raw bs=512
Then I mounted it with:
mount workbench.raw /mnt -t affs -o loop
It took a while to figure out this, in particular as there was some interference from already mounted partitions.
By the way, did you know that if the power connector on the Amiga is not properly plugged in, everything except for the sound will work? Or maybe I'm making false assumptions, but the sound disappered until I reseated the power connector.
Anders Carlsson
Tonight it refused to boot again (from the old hard disk), so I'll restore the previous dumps onto the other, larger hard disk. It is even more noisy, but operating noise rather than malfunction noise. Now I'll see if adfopus or some other PC tool (in Linux?) is able to create or resize Amiga partitions and make them bootable. Maybe it is something I'll have to figure out how to do on the Amiga alone.
Anders Carlsson
This was tricker than I thought. After much trial and error, I've come this far:
1. Re-partitioning "new" hard disk and formatting it is best done on the Amiga. The only PC tool I read about which may be able to do that is the UAE emulator (!) which supposedly can mount physical hard disks and in the emulated environment format them..
2. The HDToolBox program is found on the Workbench Install disk. However, a such disk only was delivered with Amigas with a factory installed disk. Neither my A500+ (OS2.04) or my second-hand A1200 (OS3.0) has a such install disk, only the sets of three or five OS disks.
3. The software is still actively sold by Cloanto, so it is rather hard to find pirate copies. I however found a HDF file of a full OS3.0 environment, and from that one I managed to extract the required file (singularis). I think Commodore could've included tools for hard disk partitioning and backup to all their users and skipped stuff like IntelliFont which more or less requires a hard disk to be useful anyway.
4. At the same time, Commodore could've added the PC0 driver onto the Workbench 3.0 boot disk rather than putting it onto the Storage disk, in particular as the other required support files to read PC disks already are in their right positions on the boot disk. The required file is less than 1K, and there is reasonably much space left on the boot disk. For once in a while, I decided to modify an original disk by copying the file onto the boot disk.
5. Now I could run HDToolBox off a PC formatted floppy. After some struggling, I found how to create partitions and that I have to format them too.. A good point is to not select Directory Cache, because the affs driver in Linux (on the PC) can only mount partitions with Directory Cache read-only.
6. Move the hard disk to the PC and transfer the contents. I tried some Linux approach. First, I thought I should use dd, but as I choose other dimensions of my partitions than before, it seems it would not work. Then I mounted the disk and previously backed up image:
mount -t affs /dev/hdc1 /mnt
mount -t affs -o loop workbench.raw /mnt2
I tried copying with cpio. However, it seems to ignore file permissions (R,W,X). While we're on file permissions, the Amiga has a lot of extra stuff like file comments, permission bits for Archive, Script, Pure etc. How does one preserve those?
7. Maybe using ADFOpus in Windows environment will let me duplicate the contents of the raw image (which equals a HDF file?). I'll reboot and find out.
1. Re-partitioning "new" hard disk and formatting it is best done on the Amiga. The only PC tool I read about which may be able to do that is the UAE emulator (!) which supposedly can mount physical hard disks and in the emulated environment format them..
2. The HDToolBox program is found on the Workbench Install disk. However, a such disk only was delivered with Amigas with a factory installed disk. Neither my A500+ (OS2.04) or my second-hand A1200 (OS3.0) has a such install disk, only the sets of three or five OS disks.
3. The software is still actively sold by Cloanto, so it is rather hard to find pirate copies. I however found a HDF file of a full OS3.0 environment, and from that one I managed to extract the required file (singularis). I think Commodore could've included tools for hard disk partitioning and backup to all their users and skipped stuff like IntelliFont which more or less requires a hard disk to be useful anyway.
4. At the same time, Commodore could've added the PC0 driver onto the Workbench 3.0 boot disk rather than putting it onto the Storage disk, in particular as the other required support files to read PC disks already are in their right positions on the boot disk. The required file is less than 1K, and there is reasonably much space left on the boot disk. For once in a while, I decided to modify an original disk by copying the file onto the boot disk.
5. Now I could run HDToolBox off a PC formatted floppy. After some struggling, I found how to create partitions and that I have to format them too.. A good point is to not select Directory Cache, because the affs driver in Linux (on the PC) can only mount partitions with Directory Cache read-only.
6. Move the hard disk to the PC and transfer the contents. I tried some Linux approach. First, I thought I should use dd, but as I choose other dimensions of my partitions than before, it seems it would not work. Then I mounted the disk and previously backed up image:
mount -t affs /dev/hdc1 /mnt
mount -t affs -o loop workbench.raw /mnt2
I tried copying with cpio. However, it seems to ignore file permissions (R,W,X). While we're on file permissions, the Amiga has a lot of extra stuff like file comments, permission bits for Archive, Script, Pure etc. How does one preserve those?
7. Maybe using ADFOpus in Windows environment will let me duplicate the contents of the raw image (which equals a HDF file?). I'll reboot and find out.
Anders Carlsson
No luck, partly because I'm on a Win98 (and Linux) computer. If I used W2K or better, some programs may be able to mount an alien hard disk, but as far as I understood, it is hard close to impossible to do in the older Windows versions. There is even a warning that part of the hard disk will be overwritten if one attempts to mount something non-FAT. I went as far as dowloading source code, read Microsoft programming documents and made a small program that theoretically should lock a physical volume, but I don't know if it works as the subsequent calls seem to be hardwired to devices assigned a device letter.
Since Linux can mount the disk, I will now try the Linux port of UAE to see if that one, like the W2K version of WinUAE can attach actual hard disks. I'm somewhat pessimistic, and find it rather strange if there is no useful software to dump a HDF file onto an Amiga hard disk partition. In the worst case, I'll use dd to rewrite the 60 MB backup as it was, and partition the remaining 70MB as a third partition (DH2) although I barely need it.
Edit: Nope. Regular UAE compiled for Linux seems not to have any options to mount a hard disk. On the good side, the hard disk did not seem to have been infected by Windows 98. Maybe some day when I have a lot of time, I'll learn how to gain direct access to hard disks in Linux (as root, I presume) and see if it is possible to write a HDF dumping program with help of the ADFLib.
Since Linux can mount the disk, I will now try the Linux port of UAE to see if that one, like the W2K version of WinUAE can attach actual hard disks. I'm somewhat pessimistic, and find it rather strange if there is no useful software to dump a HDF file onto an Amiga hard disk partition. In the worst case, I'll use dd to rewrite the 60 MB backup as it was, and partition the remaining 70MB as a third partition (DH2) although I barely need it.
Edit: Nope. Regular UAE compiled for Linux seems not to have any options to mount a hard disk. On the good side, the hard disk did not seem to have been infected by Windows 98. Maybe some day when I have a lot of time, I'll learn how to gain direct access to hard disks in Linux (as root, I presume) and see if it is possible to write a HDF dumping program with help of the ADFLib.
Anders Carlsson