Replacements for ST-406/ST-512 drives

From: Scott Stevens <chenmel_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Mon Feb 7 20:39:20 2005

On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 23:24:15 +0000 (GMT)
ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:

> > You are correct about some HP-IB drives not being able to format
> > their
> > own disks. I've had mixed results with the HP drives. I wonder if
> > you could mount the bare HP-IB disk drive (before it fails) and a
> > regular ST-225 in a PC and use Ghost or some other software to
> > duplicate it?
>
> This would depend on the PC controller being able to handle the
> low-level format of the HP controller, which is by no means certain!.
>
> I've never heard of 'Ghost'. Can it even handle drives with
> non-standard numbers of sectors per track?
>
> Incidentally, I do know that the HP drive boxes are very fussy about
> the drives they'll support. During the self-test they try to select
> heads beyond the number of heads that should exist, and give an error
> if the drive doesn't complain.
>
> There is a set of 4 links called the 'Ident Sea' on the controller
> board in my 9133 that seem to select one of 16 possibel drive
> geometries. I have no idea what they are, though.
>

Ghost is a common PC-based tool for imaging hard drives.

I've found the dd command under Linux to produce images as good and/or
better than Ghost.

I had an HP9000 workstation and didn't have installation media, just a
password account from the previous owner. I didn't want to wipe it out
completely in my experimenting, so I pulled the (SCSI) drive, mounted it
in a Slackware box, and used the dd command to copy it:

dd if=/dev/devicename of=imagefilename

to an image file. The totally foreign HPUX volume imaged nicely and I
could and did use dd in reverse to restore the image onto additional
drives.

This trick also works to image drives with alien filesystems that you
don't know much about and are trying to figure out. You get an image of
the drive to dig around in with a binary editor.

You, of course, need to be able to get the drive physically attached to
a Linux/whatnot system with the dd command available. This might not
work in many instances with ST-506 or proprietary controllers. Works
great with SCSI though.

-Scott
Received on Mon Feb 07 2005 - 20:39:20 GMT