Re: Vulcan drive info

[Wayne Stewart <waynes@intergate.ca>]

Patrick Schaefer wrote:

> Wayne Stewart schrieb:
>
> > I wish. The card apears to be hard coded to that particular make and
> > model of hard drive.
>
> Hard coded to those old IDE drives? Those times hardly anybody knew the
> Inquiry command. Get a drive with at least as many Heads, Sectors and
> Cylinders as your original one and give him a try.

So far no luck with that other than the drive Paul mentioned. I think over
the next few days I'll try borrowing any small HD I'm able to and seeing
if I have any luck with anything.

> If it's really hardcoded, you should find the drives name (the
> identifier string as it is displayed by a PC's bios) in the card's ROM
> or driver program. All IDE drives use the same commands, so this is the
> only way for a program to identify the drive model. Then you could try
> to replace this string with the one your new drive shows. However, if
> those guys were clever, they used a checksum to protect the string, or
> did some kind of XOR encryption.

Unfortunately the card uses a 27128 EPROM and my programmer only
goes to 2764. A friend is attempting to build me a more up to date one
but I suspect it'll be a while.

> In case you are not able to do a low level format you could use a PC
> utility like Symantec Ghost (or Linux dd) to "clone" a working HD. These
> programs do a 1:1 copy of the sectors without caring for the file
> system.

I only know a couple of people with PCs that aren't afraid to open the
case and they don't have Ghost. Good idea though.

    Wayne