Trying restore old HDD

[JackTheKnife]

I have an old Conner 80MB HDD which was shelved for about 5 years and recently I have decided to get some old stuff from it. When I connected it to the PC it was making strange noise something close to header clicking. I have read that try to bang side of it against some wood so I have did that but no luck. Then I have decided to open it to see what is going on and it came up that the header is stuck so I have put some pressure to let it go when rotating disks.

That let help to recognize that disk in WinUAE and load WB (with 2 errors) but then I was not able to copy what I was looking for. When I try to dump to hard drive file it will go to 59% or 74% and then will do that jumping header to the center (park?) and then back out with stopping spinning disks and will restart to read till WinUAE will error out.

Here is video of that: [ Show youtube player ]

Any thought on what can be wrong and if it possible to restore anything from that HDD?

[thomas]

It's simply a bad block on the disk. These old harddrives did not have smart firmwares which can mask out bad blocks automatically. They behave like floppy drives with read errors: try to recalibrate the read/write head over the track once or twice and then give up.

You need an imager which can continue after a read error or even restart after a reboot and skip some sectors.

TSGUI can do that. But it's an Amiga program. You need to run it inside WinUAE.
http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online...oads/tsgui.lha

[BastyCDGS]

Jack, you might also try ddrescue from a Linux distribution, it is an excellent tool for recovering bad blocks on hard drives. Not sure how it works with such old hard drives.

[JackTheKnife]

Originally Posted by thomas

It's simply a bad block on the disk. These old harddrives did not have smart firmwares which can mask out bad blocks automatically. They behave like floppy drives with read errors: try to recalibrate the read/write head over the track once or twice and then give up.

You need an imager which can continue after a read error or even restart after a reboot and skip some sectors.

TSGUI can do that. But it's an Amiga program. You need to run it inside WinUAE.
http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online...oads/tsgui.lha

I gave a try to TSGUI. It was able to dump 2 partitions to files. First one (WB partition) I was able to mount to WinUAE but second one was throwing non-DOS disk after trying to access is after mounting to WinUAE. Funny is both dumped partitions via TSGUI have the same size (40MB) which is not true. WB has 10MB when all the rest has almost 70MB. That dump was made with enabled option Full Disk Image.

When I will do save just a partition to a file (as hdf) it will get stuck the same as WinUAE disk dump to a file (header moving back and forth with a disk restart).

On another hand FixDisk will recognize both partition sizes correctly but can't access second one due to bigger size than 49MB.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by JackTheKnife

Funny is both dumped partitions via TSGUI have the same size (40MB) which is not true.

When you select Full Disk Image, what does it report as size? Should be around 80 MB and that should also be the size of the image.

Of course it does not matter which partition you choose, if you select Full Disk Image, the image will contain both partitions (unless the image is too small, then something went wrong).

When I will do save just a partition to a file (as hdf) it will get stuck the same as WinUAE disk dump to a file (header moving back and forth with a disk restart).

When it is stuck, reboot or whatever you need to do to get it responsive again. Then run TSGUI, select the same partition, the same options and the same image file. When you click on Disk-to-file it should ask you whether you want to overwrite the image or restart at the end. If you select restart now, it should give you another window where you can select to skip some sectors. Let it skip one or more sectors and continue. This way after a few restarts you should get a more or less complete image with only a few empty sectors.

You can also select Extended Restart from the menu. Then it will remember partition/options/image file and on restart immediately present the restart window.

[JackTheKnife]

Originally Posted by thomas

When you select Full Disk Image, what does it report as size? Should be around 80 MB and that should also be the size of the image.

Of course it does not matter which partition you choose, if you select Full Disk Image, the image will contain both partitions (unless the image is too small, then something went wrong).

When I will select Full HDD Image it shows 40MB only for some reason

Originally Posted by thomas

When it is stuck, reboot or whatever you need to do to get it responsive again. Then run TSGUI, select the same partition, the same options and the same image file. When you click on Disk-to-file it should ask you whether you want to overwrite the image or restart at the end. If you select restart now, it should give you another window where you can select to skip some sectors. Let it skip one or more sectors and continue. This way after a few restarts you should get a more or less complete image with only a few empty sectors.

You can also select Extended Restart from the menu. Then it will remember partition/options/image file and on restart immediately present the restart window.

OK I did that and I was able to dump to hdf file but WinUAE can't mount any of those 2 partitions when I will add them as UAE devices (shows Non DOS disk)

PS
both HDF files for both partitions in the HEXedit shows starting as DOS.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by JackTheKnife

When I will select Full HDD Image it shows 40MB only for some reason

Can you compress one of the images and upload it somewhere? I'd like to examine the partition table to check why it uses the wrong size.

Or, if the image is too big, run the image creation again and cancel it after a few seconds. I need only the first two megabytes.

OK I did that and I was able to dump to hdf file but WinUAE can't mount any of those 2 partitions when I will add them as UAE devices (shows Non DOS disk)

PS
both HDF files for both partitions in the HEXedit shows starting as DOS.

If you want to use single-partition HDF files with WinUAE you have to adjust the geometry to that of the original disk. In TSGUI select the partition and choose Partition Info from the Project menu. Enter the shown values in WinUAE's Add Hardfile window.

[JackTheKnife]

Originally Posted by thomas

Or, if the image is too big, run the image creation again and cancel it after a few seconds. I need only the first two megabytes.

TSGUI disk dump (few megs) attached

And finally got HDF files to work. I didn't know that TSGUI can output partition info for WinUAE. How does the geometry file for WinUAE should to look like so I can attach to related HDF file?

Thanks!

[thomas]

Originally Posted by JackTheKnife

TSGUI disk dump (few megs) attached

Thanks.

Originally Posted by JackTheKnife

How does the geometry file for WinUAE should to look like so I can attach to related HDF file?

I have no idea. There doesn't seem to be any documentation. All I found was a post saying it's undocumented.

[JackTheKnife]

I have tried to get dump of that image using ddrescue but at some point it got stuck on "splitting failed blocks" and does that restart procedure for 2nd day in a row so no clue if that part is damaged or what (looks like it must be on header #2 as first goes through the full disk)

[JackTheKnife]

Originally Posted by thomas

Can you compress one of the images and upload it somewhere? I'd like to examine the partition table to check why it uses the wrong size.

Any luck with that? If no I will move away from trying more to get that disk dump.

[thomas]

Yes, sorry that I could not get back to you earlier.

I checked the RDB in the image you made and it contains quite some inconsistencies. In fact each place which can hold geometry data holds different values. It's no surprise that TSGUI got confused.

Here is a short overview:

RDSK:
Heads   =    8
Sectors =   38  -> CylSect = 304
CylSect =  152
Cyls    =  548

DH0:
Heads   =    4
Sectors =   38  -> CylSect = 152
LowCyl  =    1
HighCyl =  109

DH1:
Heads   =    1
Sectors =  152  -> CylSect = 152
LowCyl  =  110
HighCyl = 1095

I added a check to TSGUI if the size of the RDB is different than that the disk reports about itself. If so it opens a requester and lets the user decide which size to use.
Attached is a debug version of TSGUI. It writes debug output to a file tsgui.debug in the RAM disk.

Could you try again to select one partition of the drive, enable full disk image and check it the size is now detected correctly. If not, please attach the debug output here.

As you already have working images of both partitions I would not stress the drive any more. You can combine the images into one using WinUAE with these steps:

- create a 82 MB HDF file
- add it to WinUAE as a harddrive and click on "Full Drive / RDB Mode". Make sure the button remains ghosted.
- run TSGUI and choose "Select raw device" from the menu. Select device and unit of the empty 82 MB HDF.
- select the disk.rdf file you made for me and write it to disk
- reboot WinUAE. Now DH0 should be back already and DH1 should be unreadable.
- select DH1 and the image of DH1 and write it to disk.
- reboot WinUAE again. Now both partition should be there.

[JackTheKnife]

Originally Posted by thomas

Yes, sorry that I could not get back to you earlier.

I checked the RDB in the image you made and it contains quite some inconsistencies. In fact each place which can hold geometry data holds different values. It's no surprise that TSGUI got confused.

[...]

As you already have working images of both partitions I would not stress the drive any more. You can combine the images into one using WinUAE with these steps.

Well, I think that disk is donzo. I have tried to boot Windows with connected but was not able to recognize it and at some point it was looking like motor got chocked and stopped. Headers even did not move to find starting track 0. Either speed controller died or one of those headers stopped to work (those weird readings may come from that?).


At that point over the weekend I will try WinUAE steps to see how far I will go with that.

Anyway - thanks a lot for trying to help me with it. At least it was interesting learning experience. Not sure is it worth to replace header (and motor) from another Conner which has board issue just for another working exercise on hdd