Backing up/reading odd format HDDs (Acorn Archimedes conent!

[NiceCupOfTea]

I have an early 90s Acorn Archimedes with a 420MB IDE hard disk. I want to back up the contents in case the drive fails (if it hasn't already - worked when I last booted it up 4 or 5 years ago)

The complication is it's not the Acorn ADFS disk format, it ran with a proprietary IDEFS format that the interface used (Ian Copestake Software IIRC)

PH usually has an expert on everything in its ranks so I'm hoping somebody can help me out with this!

My first port of call will be simply to plug it into a desktop machine and see what I can see, but I want to be able to keep the entire disk structure backed up (used 10 character filenames rather than 8.3, etc.)

I suppose I could always find an old sub-1 gig drive and copy the contents onto that using the Archimedes, but there must be a better solution. Plus it's still relying on an old hard drive! If I can get it into a ZIP file I can stick it on a CD.

I also have an old A7000 (cut down RiscPC) - I suppose I could swap the drive and interface card over to that and use a network card with it if I can still get hold of one...

Any ideas, or am I pissing in the wind?

[NiceCupOfTea]

No, I never had it networked...

I am wondering if an Arc emulator on a PC would access it - reading what little documentation there is on Arculator it claims to have support for the ICS IDE interface.

[NiceCupOfTea]

deckster said:

Network is definitely the way to go if at all possible, failing that it's either another internal disk as you say or plugging in a Zip drive, if you can find one. I don't recall anybody ever producing an external hard drive enclosure for RISCOS but I could be wrong.

If none of that works then you could always try these people http://www.apdl.co.uk/ - they look like they may be able to come up with something creative.

I used to have a couple of 5.25in ST506 hard drives (20MB a piece IIRC!) in external enclosures - shutting down the machine was a real event!

I will have a hunt around in the loft and see if I can find another old hard drive.

Did they even do ethernet cards for the Arc? 10baseT perhaps? Gawd knows how I'd hook it up to my router

[NiceCupOfTea]

marshalla said:

rxtx said:

BlueMR2 said:

Try plugging it into a linux box.

I wonder if that would work, might need to know the block size though:

dd if=/dev/<arch disk> of=disk.img

That should do the trick, as long as you image the whole disc.It will produce a nice flat image file which can be written back at some point in the future. Black size doesn't really matter, except for speed of reading. the default of 512 should be correct for a disc of that age/type though.

Wouldn't it have to be written to an identical drive though?

I don't have access to Linux, but would one of those bootable CD distros do the job? Once it's saved as a disk image presumably I could copy it into Windows filespace and access it using Arculator if it's ICS IDE emulation works...

I seem to recall that the ICS hard drive interfaces were pretty popular in the early 90s. They were ste to deal with though. I had an early one which didn't work when plugged into a backplane, only when plugged straight into the podule slot. They refused to admit there was a problem - eventually I sent it back and bought another a year or so later which worked. Still have a screen shot somewhere of the filer window saying 0 bytes free Those were the days, no swap files, ROM OS, booting in 2 seconds!

[NiceCupOfTea]

marshalla said:

I've just had a look at the spec. for the filesystem, it's not massively complex and it should be possible to produce something which can parse it and extract files without requiring a massive effort.

Where did you find the spec?

[NiceCupOfTea]

Cheers Dave, will have a look. Unfortunately it's not Acorn's own ADFS format, it's IDEFS which was proprietary. How different it is I don't know though

[NiceCupOfTea]

Turrican > thanks, will look into that. Any reason I shouldn't just plug it into the PC via a standard IDE cable?

Dave > interesting. I always understood that Acorn IDE (ADFS) and the IDEFS by ICS/Baildon electronics were incompatible...

So it looks like the plan is try to get a disc image using FTK / Linux by connecting the drive to a PC, then see if I can get into the drive image using Linux or Arculator...

Hope it works, did a lot of coding back in the day and it's all on that hard disk. No backups of course; where the hell did you get enough disk space to back up 420MB? That's a lot of diskswaps!