The Icon Bar: General: Acorn 80MB Conner data recovery via PI?
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Acorn 80MB Conner data recovery via PI? |
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giggler321 (07:11 6/4/2017)
Phlamethrower (09:16 7/4/2017)
CJE (10:33 7/4/2017)
arawnsley (17:00 7/4/2017)
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mr giggler |
Message #124065, posted by giggler321 at 07:11, 6/4/2017 |
Member
Posts: 1
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Hi,
I have a non-working A5000. It's HDD has lots of stuff on from the 1990's. I have been told I could connect it directly to my PI runnin RiscOS.
I have bought lots (6) USB to IDE interfaces off ebay. They work on my PC with PC HDD's.
I cannot seem to get the PI to understand and use the USB HDD. I kind of had it working once, if I format on the PI under RiscOS but it does not seem to read the old Acorn drive.
If I put the Acorn HDD in my working A4000, I can read it.
Additionally, I've got a couple of IDE to SD card adapters as I figured this would be an alternative. However, !HDForm on the A4000 detects the SD, says but crashes with an exception before it completes format.
Please can anyone suggest ideas or help. I do not have a LAN port in my A4000.
Regards |
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Jeffrey Lee |
Message #124066, posted by Phlamethrower at 09:16, 7/4/2017, in reply to message #124065 |
 Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot Hot stuff
Posts: 15100
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I think the problem you're running into is that USB to IDE adapters only work properly with LBA drives. With CHS drives they either refuse to talk to the drive or get the geometry wrong.
I think your options are:
* Work out a way of networking the Pi to the A4000 (serial port?) and copy the data that way
* Take the drive along to a local user group and have someone else extract the data for you (the drive should work fine in a RiscPC, possibly an Iyonix too)
* Find an old PC and use that to make an image of the drive which you can then mount under an emulator (which can be tricky), or write to a SD card/USB stick. However the emphasis here is probably on "old" PC since apparently modern ones can be equally confused by CHS drives.
* Find a small/old IDE drive which supports LBA+CHS and try formatting it on the A4000. I'm not sure if the A4000 supported LBA out of the box, but you might be able to find suitable CHS settings that make the drive readable by both the A4000 and the USB-IDE adapter (obviously you won't be able to format the full capacity of the drive, but since you've only got 80MB to transfer that shouldn't be an issue) |
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Chris Evans |
Message #124067, posted by CJE at 10:33, 7/4/2017, in reply to message #124066 |
CJE Micros chap
Posts: 228
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I think your options are:
...
* Take the drive along to a local user group and have someone else extract the data for you (the drive should work fine in a RiscPC, possibly an Iyonix too)
... Or we (cjemicros.co.uk) offer a commercial service and could copy the contents to an SD card! |
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Andrew Rawnsley |
Message #124068, posted by arawnsley at 17:00, 7/4/2017, in reply to message #124067 |
R-Comp chap
Posts: 600
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Ditto for us at R-Comp (rcomp.co.uk), but I was trying to avoid advertising 
In the meantime, whilst an A4000 isn't the most useful of starting points, you could take the data off onto floppies, especially if you have a zip program like !Spark/!SparkFS or equivalent freebie (!zipee?).
From floppy, you could use a middle-man system (examples would include RiscPC/Iyonix or old PC system with floppydrive+VirtualAcorn). These would provide a route to a more modern medium (USB stick, SD card etc)
If you go to *DOS* floppies (will require zipping of things, if you're going to preserve filetypes), then USB floppy drives can be used on more common platforms (Windows/Mac/Linux) to preserve your data, for minimal outlay.
Back to advertising (so feel free to skip this para), we have old floppy-equipped RISCubes (virtualacorn) available for reasonable prices, which gives you USB + floppy + 26bit compatibility. We also have second hand Iyonixes available cheaply (also gives floppy + USB ). However, I appreciate you may not wish to buy a machine to do this, so it may just be easier to have someone do it for you.
Ultimately, the big questions are "what do you want to preserve" and "where do you want to use it"? There are at least two routes to preservation which will be affected by those questions, and that determines the best way to preserve your data.
PS, I'd be *sorely* tempted to recommend looking into a second hand ethernet interface for the A4000, but I think they may have been a pain in the neck to expand (glorified A3010, if memory serves?), and then you need to update the software side of the system ("new" !Boot etc). Not a simple task.
[Edited by arawnsley at 18:00, 7/4/2017]
[Edited by arawnsley at 18:01, 7/4/2017] |
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The Icon Bar: General: Acorn 80MB Conner data recovery via PI? |
