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)