Hard drive with ms-dos 5.0 is ready to retire, how do I ba..

[Kris]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

The system has a 40MB hard drive that is having problems finding boot
sectors. I don't have the disks for the software on the drive, and I
really need to get that software on to a new drive with MS-dos 5.0
somehow. The computer has a 5.25" drive, parallell port and serial
port. That's it.

Any ideas?

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

On 2004-11-18, Kris <kristoffertorvik@yahoo.com> wrote:

> The system has a 40MB hard drive that is having problems finding boot
> sectors. I don't have the disks for the software on the drive, and I
> really need to get that software on to a new drive with MS-dos 5.0
> somehow. The computer has a 5.25" drive, parallell port and serial
> port. That's it.

Is it an IDE drive ? Move the drive to a working computer. Mount
the partition(s) you're interested in read-only and cp -a it to
wherever is appropriate. Assuming the partition of interest is
the first primary partition and you install the 40MB drive as
slave on the primary IDE port,

mount -o ro -t msdos /dev/hdb1 /mnt
cp -a /mnt /somewhere-safe

If you can't read the boot sector, you may have to do some
guesswork as to the beginning and end of partition. If it uses
up all disk, it's probably a primary partition. It should start
at 0.1.1 and end at C-1.H-1.S (where C, H, S are the number of
cylinders, heads and sectors per track of the drive). (The
notation above is 0-based for the cylinder and head number and
1-based for the sector number). Assuming the geometry is
78.16.63,

dd bs=512 skip=63 if=/dev/hdb of=image
mount -o ro,loop -t msdos image /mnt
cp -a /mnt /somewhere-safe

If there are unreadable sectors inside the partition, you may
have to use something else than dd for the copy.

--
André Majorel <URL:http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/>
Things will be bright in P.M. A cop will shine a light in your face.