Rescue Data from Old Hard drive

Hi,

My beloved Childhood A1200 has stopped booting from its 120mb hdd.

Can anyone help me try and rescue any data on it?

I totally understand it may be fubar but want to try and see if I can mount it especially without deleting any data in error. I cant really remember what was even on it.

In HDtool box I have tried to mount it but get this error:

The file exists. I guess it could be corrupt. I click continue then save changes the drive spins up, sound normal but the HDtoolbox program freezes.

I read a post from 2013 from someone who had something kind of similar and it was suggested the memory was faulty.

Any help would be appreciated.
Kind Regards,
James

[lesta_smsc]

Is there anyway to connect these to a PC? There are more apps to obtain files from HDD on PC using lower spin cycle.

Thanks for the reply. The drive is ide I believe so should be able to connect it some how. It has no power connector and looks like pin one is cut out. It’s alwsys been cut I guess it’s an a1200 requirement. I’ve just had an old ide pc caps leak trashed the mb. Will see if I can get some kind of converter to usb or sata maybe ?

Keep the ideas coming.

[lesta_smsc]

Send pic of the drive. Also what make and model is It?

[scuzz]

Originally Posted by fiatbravodriver

Hi,

My beloved Childhood A1200 has stopped booting from its 120mb hdd.

Can anyone help me try and rescue any data on it?

I totally understand it may be fubar but want to try and see if I can mount it especially without deleting any data in error. I cant really remember what was even on it.

In HDtool box I have tried to mount it but get this error:

The file exists. I guess it could be corrupt. I click continue then save changes the drive spins up, sound normal but the HDtoolbox program freezes.

I read a post from 2013 from someone who had something kind of similar and it was suggested the memory was faulty.

Any help would be appreciated.
Kind Regards,
James

First up leave the drive running. If the drive light is on just leave it to validate. Eventually it will clear. I really wouldn't mess with the drive as you will corrupt the thing. Best you can do is use a floppy install disk and check that its visble. From there its tricky cus to see the drive you are going to have to put the thing into saving some changes. So checking the drive with HDToolbox and then saving the changes will get the icons to pop up again. But you will most likely lose data and you don't want to do that. So beware saving... but validating and checking for errors is a good tactic.

For me I would leave it running all day and see what happens. By the way you look like you are trying to format if the file system is being accessed. Be careful. Probably mechanical.. they do lock up after a while of inactivity.

It may be physical and a stuck head... so below I give some tips on what I do. Not sure you have this problem, but hey I'm just putting it out there. And there are companies that could restore the data for you but would mean quite a bit of money I would have thought. Sometimes just accessing the drive from a floppy gets the unit to be recognised. If the drive has a sector at the core that defines aspects of the drive and thats gone belly up its probably coopers ducks but hey. I have so many of these drives busted. The trick is to back them up.


You could try the freezer trick. By the way I take no responsibility for this what so ever. Earlier this year I took half a dozen busted 2.5" drives from Amiga 1200s and stuck them in freezer bags and placed them in the freezer comapartment for a couple of days. I then removed and made sure they were not wet. I then tapped them with a rubber ended screwdriver and like magic three of them started working again. I have them in Amigas and switch on every day to make sure they are working.


I had a failed drive in a Viper in a 500 and just left it on all day. Eventually it started working again.


I have two 2000s that have the same issue and I have to stand them on their side and leave them for a few hours.


I recently watched a video on YouTube where a guy dismantled the hard drive. I did try that myself this week but it didn't work.


So if all fails hit the thing. But I didn't tell you that. And I take no responsibility for failure.


PS There are companies that will retrive the data for you. A PC isn't going to be able to read the drive its in a different format.

PPS When you say you are trying to mount the disk are you using a floppy with HDToolbox on cus probably thats the disk that doesn't have the FastFileSystem in L and not the computer. Given that you cannot boot I am assuming that the hard drive isn't working. So what noises are you getting from the drive. Does it try to spin up and then after a few goes gives up. Confused where the hdtoolbox is that you are looking at. I mean are you able to access the drive but simply can't boot.... I assume not as then you could retrieve the data. If you have two partitions just copy the one to the other.. Format the WB and then simply resinstall WB. You can do that without switching the computer off. Always check hard drives using a floppy.

And two mouse buttons down on boot what devices are available. Is your hard drive on the list.

scuzz
http://www.scuzzscink.com/amiga/scuzzblog.htm

[ptyerman]

The drive is accessible through a PC by using WinUAE or fs-UAE, but only if the drive is working.
Also if it's working, you can copy it via a PC using the free Clonezilla disk imaging software. However, because the PC doesn't recognize Amiga partitions you would have to use block copy. You could copy directly to another drive or to a disk image but it would also copy over any existing errors!

[Nobby_UK]

Originally Posted by lesta_smsc

Is there anyway to connect these to a PC? There are more apps to obtain files from HDD on PC using lower spin cycle.

Yup
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/USB-2-0-t...m/302928374943
= £2.65 from Manchester

[Jope]

A 120MB drive such as that really should be plugged into a PC's motherboard IDE connector. It most likely will not work with USB PATA adapters.

[jolly11]

you probably need an hard drive adapter because your hard disk is 2,5"

[Nobby_UK]

My old Conner (2.5 in) 40 MB worked

[ElectroBlaster]

I did a bunch of amiga drive imaging a couple of months back!

I did initially try those IDE2USB adaptor things but they are a pita if the drives are small in capacity as they just do not appear at all!

The absolute best way I found was to grab an old pc with on-board ide ports and then hook the drives up directly!

I built this imaging system from old parts:

Intel Atom ITX board with on board ide,
Windows 7,
HDDRegen,
Winuae,
2.5" to 3.5" ide adaptor board,
Bunch of ide cables, power adaptor leads etc.
*Also added in a SCSI card so I could image scsi drives in the same way!

I then took every drive I wanted to save and imaged then directly with Winuae into hardfile images, then after that copied everything directly using a workbench and diskmaster so I had in effect an image and a direct file copy.

Any issues I encountered I cracked open HDDRegen on the pc side to repair back sectors (Amazed that program is VERY good and saved two drives that were in a bad way)

Then Diskdoctor and Quarterback tools on the Amiga side to repair little issues with corrupted files.

It is not 100% perfect but near dam it

[rcman]

Originally Posted by fiatbravodriver

Hi,

My beloved Childhood A1200 has stopped booting from its 120mb hdd.

Can anyone help me try and rescue any data on it?

I totally understand it may be fubar but want to try and see if I can mount it especially without deleting any data in error. I cant really remember what was even on it.

In HDtool box I have tried to mount it but get this error:

The file exists. I guess it could be corrupt. I click continue then save changes the drive spins up, sound normal but the HDtoolbox program freezes.

I read a post from 2013 from someone who had something kind of similar and it was suggested the memory was faulty.

Any help would be appreciated.
Kind Regards,
James

I installed Linux Mint(Ubuntu based) on another machine. In my case, I wanted to back up my old SCSI drives from my A2000. I put an SCSI controller in this machine and just connected the drives.

Then do the mount command and it should automount an Amiga File System

For IDE this should be even easier.

You can google links about mounting Amiga Hard drives in Linux

When you connect the drive, here's what you need to do.

- it won't automount by default
- so you need to run this command: sudo fdisk -l
- this will show you your current boot drive and another one that it sees
- let's say your boot drive is SDA then your Amiga drive will be SDB
- as root run a : mkdir /mnt/MyAmigadrive <- this will make a directory where you can back up your stuff OR
- Linux Mint comes with a backup tool, you can tell it which drive you to want to back up and it will put it where you want and compress it.

Need more help just ask.



RC

[Jope]

If you use dd to make a disk image, you will have all timestamps, filecomments etc intact. This can just be attached into winuae.

I just wanted to say a big thanks to everyone who has helped on this. I am going to tackle this over Christmas in my free time. Will post how I get on. I have the adapter here less than £3 delivered :-)

[mark_k]

If you have the IDE-USB adapter that Nobby-UK linked you'll need to use WinUAE to image the drive.

The WDA-2120 doesn't support LBA access, only CHS. Most IDE-USB adapters don't support CHS accesses, but WinUAE has special handling for that which other programs don't. That special handling works at least with some JMicron-based IDE-USB adapters (which look very similar to the one Nobby_UK linked).

A related thread here.