A friend has asked me to recover photos from the system disk of an ancient PC.
I booted the old PC, and the disk is in need of "initialisation". Now, my knowledge at this level is pretty hazy, but I figure I'll need to use something
Testdisk to recover the partition, and hopefully its contents.
But it's an IDE disk. I do have an IDE to USB3 adapter, but I've always suspected that the USB interface "gets in the way" of the low-level activity likely to be involved in this sort of recovery. I've found in the past that USB2 adapters don't allow SMART data to be read, for example, and only sometimes (?) has this been possible with USB3 adapters.
I do have an old PC (grindingly slow) which has IDE ports on the board, but it
would be much more convenient to do this work on a newer, faster machine. My principal PC has an E-SATA card which I've found very useful for attaching a SATA disk dock - it's just like the disks are directly connected to the board.
So would it make sense to buy an E-SATA to SATA adapter cable, plus a SATA to IDE adapter? Or would the 'adapters' somehow mangle things (as the USB2 adapters seemed to do)? I'll be grateful for any advice from the smart folk here.
A friend has asked me to recover photos from the system disk of an ancient PC.
I booted the old PC, and the disk is in need of "initialisation". Now, my knowledge at this level is pretty hazy, but I figure I'll need to use something
Testdisk to recover the partition, and hopefully its contents.
But it's an IDE disk. I do have an IDE to USB3 adapter, but I've always suspected that the USB interface "gets in the way" of the low-level activity likely to be involved in this sort of recovery. I've found in the past that USB2 adapters don't allow SMART data to be read, for example, and only sometimes (?) has this been possible with USB3 adapters.
I do have an old PC (grindingly slow) which has IDE ports on the board, but it
would be much more convenient to do this work on a newer, faster machine. My principal PC has an E-SATA card which I've found very useful for attaching a SATA disk dock - it's just like the disks are directly connected to the board.
So would it make sense to buy an E-SATA to SATA adapter cable, plus a SATA to IDE adapter? Or would the 'adapters' somehow mangle things (as the USB2 adapters seemed to do)? I'll be grateful for any advice from the smart folk here.
On 30/09/2021 12:07, Philip Herlihy wrote:
A friend has asked me to recover photos from the system disk of an ancient PC.
I booted the old PC, and the disk is in need of "initialisation". Now, my knowledge at this level is pretty hazy, but I figure I'll need to use something
Testdisk to recover the partition, and hopefully its contents.
But it's an IDE disk. I do have an IDE to USB3 adapter, but I've always suspected that the USB interface "gets in the way" of the low-level activity
likely to be involved in this sort of recovery. I've found in the past that
USB2 adapters don't allow SMART data to be read, for example, and only sometimes (?) has this been possible with USB3 adapters.
I do have an old PC (grindingly slow) which has IDE ports on the board, but it
would be much more convenient to do this work on a newer, faster machine. My
principal PC has an E-SATA card which I've found very useful for attaching a
SATA disk dock - it's just like the disks are directly connected to the board.
So would it make sense to buy an E-SATA to SATA adapter cable, plus a SATA to
IDE adapter? Or would the 'adapters' somehow mangle things (as the USB2 adapters seemed to do)? I'll be grateful for any advice from the smart folk
here.
Can't really answer the question, but personally I would start by seeing
what your IDE machine can recover. Do you think that is going to require continuous intervention on your part? To my mind there is more to go
wrong as you introduce interfaces.
A friend has asked me to recover photos from the system disk of an
ancient PC. I booted the old PC, and the disk is in need of
"initialisation". Now, my knowledge at this level is pretty hazy, but I figure I'll need to use something Testdisk to recover the partition, and hopefully its contents.
But it's an IDE disk. I do have an IDE to USB3 adapter, but I've always suspected that the USB interface "gets in the way" of the low-level
activity likely to be involved in this sort of recovery. I've found in
the past that USB2 adapters don't allow SMART data to be read, for
example, and only sometimes (?) has this been possible with USB3
adapters.
I do have an old PC (grindingly slow) which has IDE ports on the board,
but it would be much more convenient to do this work on a newer, faster machine. My principal PC has an E-SATA card which I've found very
useful for attaching a SATA disk dock - it's just like the disks are
directly connected to the board.
So would it make sense to buy an E-SATA to SATA adapter cable, plus a
SATA to IDE adapter? Or would the 'adapters' somehow mangle things (as
the USB2 adapters seemed to do)? I'll be grateful for any advice from
the smart folk here.
A friend has asked me to recover photos from the system disk of an ancient PC. I booted the old PC, and the disk is in need of "initialisation".
Now, my knowledge at this level is pretty hazy, but I figure I'll need to
use something Testdisk to recover the partition, and hopefully its
contents.
But it's an IDE disk. I do have an IDE to USB3 adapter, but I've always suspected that the USB interface "gets in the way" of the low-level
activity likely to be involved in this sort of recovery. I've found in
the past that USB2 adapters don't allow SMART data to be read, for
example, and only sometimes (?) has this been possible with USB3 adapters.
I do have an old PC (grindingly slow) which has IDE ports on the board,
but it would be much more convenient to do this work on a newer, faster machine. My principal PC has an E-SATA card which I've found very useful
for attaching a SATA disk dock - it's just like the disks are directly connected to the board.
So would it make sense to buy an E-SATA to SATA adapter cable, plus a SATA
to IDE adapter? Or would the 'adapters' somehow mangle things (as the
USB2 adapters seemed to do)? I'll be grateful for any advice from the
smart folk here.
<https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dynamode-Port-Sata-Card-Electronics/dp/ B001A50LH6/>
Would something like this do the trick?
About the same price as the external USB adapters and the eSATA adapters,
I think.
I have no idea if this is a true IDE card (with drivers) or some bodge to convert to SATA on the card.
On Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 12:07:10 PM UTC+1, Philip Herlihy wrote:
A friend has asked me to recover photos from the system disk of an ancient PC.
I booted the old PC, and the disk is in need of "initialisation". Now, my knowledge at this level is pretty hazy, but I figure I'll need to use something
Testdisk to recover the partition, and hopefully its contents.
But it's an IDE disk. I do have an IDE to USB3 adapter, but I've always suspected that the USB interface "gets in the way" of the low-level activity
likely to be involved in this sort of recovery. I've found in the past that USB2 adapters don't allow SMART data to be read, for example, and only sometimes (?) has this been possible with USB3 adapters.
I do have an old PC (grindingly slow) which has IDE ports on the board, but it
would be much more convenient to do this work on a newer, faster machine. My
principal PC has an E-SATA card which I've found very useful for attaching a
SATA disk dock - it's just like the disks are directly connected to the board.
So would it make sense to buy an E-SATA to SATA adapter cable, plus a SATA to
IDE adapter? Or would the 'adapters' somehow mangle things (as the USB2 adapters seemed to do)? I'll be grateful for any advice from the smart folk here.
Depends a bit on your level of knowledge, but could you:
- boot the ancient PC from a USB drive running Linux, and maybe with another partition on it
- image the suspect drive onto the USB drive
- take the contents away and look at them at leisure with TestDisk
?
J^n
On Thu, 30 Sep 2021 12:07:09 +0100, Philip Herlihy wrote:
A friend has asked me to recover photos from the system disk of an
ancient PC. I booted the old PC, and the disk is in need of "initialisation". Now, my knowledge at this level is pretty hazy, but I figure I'll need to use something Testdisk to recover the partition, and hopefully its contents.
But it's an IDE disk. I do have an IDE to USB3 adapter, but I've always suspected that the USB interface "gets in the way" of the low-level activity likely to be involved in this sort of recovery. I've found in
the past that USB2 adapters don't allow SMART data to be read, for
example, and only sometimes (?) has this been possible with USB3
adapters.
I do have an old PC (grindingly slow) which has IDE ports on the board,
but it would be much more convenient to do this work on a newer, faster machine. My principal PC has an E-SATA card which I've found very
useful for attaching a SATA disk dock - it's just like the disks are directly connected to the board.
So would it make sense to buy an E-SATA to SATA adapter cable, plus a
SATA to IDE adapter? Or would the 'adapters' somehow mangle things (as
the USB2 adapters seemed to do)? I'll be grateful for any advice from
the smart folk here.
<https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dynamode-Port-Sata-Card-Electronics/dp/ B001A50LH6/>
Would something like this do the trick?
About the same price as the external USB adapters and the eSATA adapters,
I think.
I have no idea if this is a true IDE card (with drivers) or some bodge to convert to SATA on the card.
Cheers
Dave R
--
AMD FX-6300 in GA-990X-Gaming SLI-CF running Windows 7 Pro x64
Philip Herlihy <thiswillbounceback@you.com> wrote:
A friend has asked me to recover photos from the system disk of an ancient PC. I booted the old PC, and the disk is in need of "initialisation".
Now, my knowledge at this level is pretty hazy, but I figure I'll need to use something Testdisk to recover the partition, and hopefully its contents.
But it's an IDE disk. I do have an IDE to USB3 adapter, but I've always suspected that the USB interface "gets in the way" of the low-level activity likely to be involved in this sort of recovery. I've found in
the past that USB2 adapters don't allow SMART data to be read, for
example, and only sometimes (?) has this been possible with USB3 adapters.
How ancient is it? If it's ~1995 or later it's likely to be using LBA addressing, which is what everything today uses. If it uses the older CHS addressing the adapter may talk to it incorrectly. I'm not sure when that died out in Windowsland, but maybe early 90s.
I would just give it a try and see how you get on.
If it's really old (PC-XT or something) the drive may only have an 8 bit connection, but that's pretty unlikely.
SMART is a different command set that the adapter needs to explicitly support, and which needs to be translated between ATA and USB - many
adapters don't handle that. It's not part of the mainline data
communication interface.
I do have an old PC (grindingly slow) which has IDE ports on the board,
but it would be much more convenient to do this work on a newer, faster machine. My principal PC has an E-SATA card which I've found very useful for attaching a SATA disk dock - it's just like the disks are directly connected to the board.
So would it make sense to buy an E-SATA to SATA adapter cable, plus a SATA to IDE adapter? Or would the 'adapters' somehow mangle things (as the
USB2 adapters seemed to do)? I'll be grateful for any advice from the smart folk here.
I'd have thought a SATA to PATA adapter is at the same risk as mangling things as a PATA to USB adapter.
Does your old PC have a USB card? Or can it take a PCI one? If the
USB-PATA adapter doesn't work, I'd try using it as an intermediary to copy from PATA to a USB stick.
If you can boot a Linux 'recovery CD' on it, taking a raw drive image
would be something like:
dd if=/dev/sda of=rawdisk.img bs=512
assuming you made sure that sda was referring to the right drive.
Or:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512
if you wanted to clone to another (USB?) drive.
Theo
I keep telling myself I must get on top of Linux. But to operate
safely, especially using a 'foreign' filesystem you do have to have a
certain minimum of contextual understanding or you're going to screw something up. That might be relatively quickly achieved, especially for someone with a (historic) background in Unix (SunOS, anyone?) but it'll
take more time than I currently have. Competent folk often lose sight
of the breadth of their knowledge!
On Fri, 01 Oct 2021 10:38:07 +0100, Philip Herlihy wrote:
<snip>
I keep telling myself I must get on top of Linux. But to operate
safely, especially using a 'foreign' filesystem you do have to have a certain minimum of contextual understanding or you're going to screw something up. That might be relatively quickly achieved, especially for someone with a (historic) background in Unix (SunOS, anyone?) but it'll take more time than I currently have. Competent folk often lose sight
of the breadth of their knowledge!
IIRC SunOS was Berkley Systems Division Unix.
[As opposed to AT&T System V.)]
In which case a FreeBSD variant might be a good place to start.
Mind you I've forgotten about 90% of my Unix knowledge by now.
Like riding a bicycle it will probably come back quite quickly, but not
the best route for a critical action as a learning experience.
In article <cPf*1Gxvy@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>, theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk says...
Thanks. I don't know how old the original PC was - all I have now is the disk
itself. It's a seagate ST3491A, stamped with a date of January 1995.
I was particularly interested in what you said about SMART, which may or not be
'translated' by adapters. I guess what I'm fumbling to understand is what translation goes on. Clearly, in something trivial like an E-SATA to SATA cable/adapter it's just a case of mapping wires. But with a USB interface there is 'electronics' in there. What's it doing? What can't it do?
Current thinking is to try a PATA to SATA adapter and proceed carefully. I've
found that if Acronis True Image can 'see' a disk, then an image can subsequently be 'mounted' and the files read - that's all read-only as far as the source disk is concerned. I might see if Testdisk can see the disk via such an adapter, but it's possibly more of a gamble to ask Testdisk to 'correct' the partition. I may just end up with my old IDE-capable PC all over
the kitchen (and the missus all over me...).
I keep telling myself I must get on top of Linux. But to operate safely, especially using a 'foreign' filesystem you do have to have a certain minimum of contextual understanding or you're going to screw something up. That might
be relatively quickly achieved, especially for someone with a (historic) background in Unix (SunOS, anyone?) but it'll take more time than I currently have. Competent folk often lose sight of the breadth of their knowledge!
Philip Herlihy <thiswillbounceback@you.com> wrote:
In article <cPf*1Gxvy@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>, theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk says...
Thanks. I don't know how old the original PC was - all I have now is the disk
itself. It's a seagate ST3491A, stamped with a date of January 1995.
Do you know what OS it was running? That drive is about the borderline between when software and drives switched from CHS (cylinder/head/sector) to LBA (logical block addressing). It is possible current software and
adapters don't handle CHS correctly, although it may be that the disc is equally readable in either format.
If the original driver used the CHS in the wrong order you can end up with a permutation of your disc blocks, which makes the drive appear to contain garbage. With LBA there's no ambiguity.
I was particularly interested in what you said about SMART, which may or not be
'translated' by adapters. I guess what I'm fumbling to understand is what translation goes on. Clearly, in something trivial like an E-SATA to SATA cable/adapter it's just a case of mapping wires. But with a USB interface there is 'electronics' in there. What's it doing? What can't it do?
USB Mass Storage is based on the SCSI protocol. IDE and SATA are based on the ATA protocol. It's a bit like English and French, and the adapter has
to understand both fully to translate between the two. If you don't have
the vocab to understand what the Frenchman says, you can't say the English equivalent - which is what happens with SMART.
(There are ways to say 'just quote this French phrase and he'll understand' which cover some of the more obscure corners, but it still needs somebody to speak French)
The trouble with adapters is the firmware running on them is not always as comprehensive or fully-featured as you might hope, since the chips are being knocked out for $1 a time.
My concern is the CHS v LBA thing might blindside the USB adapter - while a native Frenchman might understand Norman French, somebody who barely speaks modern French might not.
Current thinking is to try a PATA to SATA adapter and proceed carefully. I've
found that if Acronis True Image can 'see' a disk, then an image can subsequently be 'mounted' and the files read - that's all read-only as far as
the source disk is concerned. I might see if Testdisk can see the disk via such an adapter, but it's possibly more of a gamble to ask Testdisk to 'correct' the partition. I may just end up with my old IDE-capable PC all over
the kitchen (and the missus all over me...).
I'm not sure to what extent the cylinder/head/sector registers are
replicated in SATA, or whether the interface is entirely LBA by that point. But I don't think it would be too dangerous to try - worst case it won't be detected, or appear as garbage.
I would not ever think of writing to the disk, you can't be sure that won't damage something and it's your only copy. Get a bit image of it that you
can duplicate, and then work on a copy of that (if you like, write it to a USB stick so it's easy to mount etc. Or connect it to a VM as a virtual disc)
I keep telling myself I must get on top of Linux. But to operate safely, especially using a 'foreign' filesystem you do have to have a certain minimum
of contextual understanding or you're going to screw something up. That might
be relatively quickly achieved, especially for someone with a (historic) background in Unix (SunOS, anyone?) but it'll take more time than I currently
have. Competent folk often lose sight of the breadth of their knowledge!
Agreed. I'm not sure what the best user-friendly danger-free recovery toolkit is, perhaps there is something out there...
Theo
Looking at your headers, do the names Wilkes and Wheeler mean anything to you, Theo?
Philip Herlihy <thiswillbounceback@you.com> wrote:
Looking at your headers, do the names Wilkes and Wheeler mean anything to you, Theo?
They do indeed :) Maurice was a regular visitor for beer and reminisences about his vacuum tubes. I didn't know David for long before he died but
ISTR he was rather good at our lunchtime Times crossword...
Theo
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