Re: Focus Drive //e woes

[Jerry <SNIPawanderin@yahoSNIPo.ca>]

William Katz wrote:
> Well, I tried all 5 levels of SpinRite 6.0 on the drive, and it did not
> seem to fix the booting problem.
> 
> In fact, it showed data fly by in one of the screens as it was checking
> the drive, so all the data is in tact.
> 
> When starting SpinRite 6.0 (at the boot screen, before the Splash Screen)
> it shows this:
> 
>  - InitDiskillegal partition table - drive 00 sector 0
> illegal partition table - drive 00 sector 0
> illegal partition table - drive 00 sector 0
> illegal partition table - drive 00 sector 0
> 
> I guess something with the boot sector got mangled somehow??

Well, yes and no.  SpinRite only knows about DOS/Windows partition tables,
not Apple ones, so it would always declare a non-DOS partition table as
messed up.  However, since SpinRite verified that the data on the disk
itself can be read fine, I'd guess that the Apple/Focus partition
information got mangled somehow.

[...]
> Okay, I can not belive it!!!!
> After attaching the drive (ibm dha-2270) to my PC, it recognized it in the
> bios, and I booted into Windows XP.  I downloaded CiderPress v2.4.5 and
> OMG!!  It recognized the physical drive as being a FocusDrive and read in
> all 6 Focus partitions!  Turns out I don't have any data on partitions 3,
> 4, 5, or 6.. but still, I can retrieve all the data from the drive!!

Great!  So you can at least back everything up.

If you ran Linux, I'd suggest using 'dd' to copy the entire disk to a file. 
There are Windows programs that do the same thing.

> I have not played around with CiderPress that much last night, but what I
> would like to do is "image" the entire FocusDrive to a file, then 'fdisk'
> the ibm dha-2270 (the FocusDrive)... then can i re-image back to the
> drive? Maybe that will fix the boot sector problem?
> 
> Right now I am just happy to get the data back : )

I'll bet!

Does the Focus drive use an Apple-style partition table?  Those types of
partitions are documented here:

  http://www.awprofessional.com/articles/article.asp?p=376123&seqNum=3&rl=1

You may be able to reconstruct the partition table seeing as how CiderPress
could.

-- 
--  Jerry