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Re: Focus Drive //e woes
William Katz wrote:
Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
William Katz wrote:
Jerry <SNIPawanderin@yahosnipo.ca> wrote:
Michael J. Mahon wrote:
William Katz wrote:
I have also *not* tried to put the hard
drive in an ibm computer and see if any disk checking utilities would fix
it?
That wouldn't help, since PC utilities only "fix" disks with PC
formatting. It would be a way to do a low-level format, but that
is almost certainly not the problem.
If you buy the SpinRite program from Steve Gibson (http://grc.com/), it can
fix a somewhat damaged hard drive. It runs on a PC, but does not care what
the high-level filesystem information is, as it talks to the drive
controller and does its work that way. I have used this software to repair
drives that seemed completely gone and was delighted to have the data back.
Jerry
Thanks guys for your replies. I tried re-seating the card in slot 7, as
well as re-seating the hard drive itself on the Focus Card.
I also tried getting Prosel to fix it.
So far nothing worked yet.
I plan on trying SpinRite 6.0 on the hard drive, but I have to get a 2
1/2" to 3 1/2" ide hard drive converter in order to connect it to one of
my desktop computers. It seems like ebay has hundreds of them I can get.
Also, does anyone know if Alltech (Computer Circulation Center) still
sells these? I actually bought the Focus Drive //e from them back in July
of 2001. Maybe I can call them for support?
Anyway, if SpinRite does not fix the drive, I might 'fdisk' it to blank
out any partition information on it. If I fdisk the drive, and put it
back in my //e, will I be able to format it okay??
I'd first try re-writing the partition table that the Focus uses.
It's one block that, if clobbered, prevents any partition from
mounting--and it can be fixed.
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??
It isn't the boot sector, it's the partition table.
The Focus drive writes a block containing the partition
start addresses and sizes (though I don't know the actual format).
If this block were re-written to match the original partitioning,
you would likely have all your data intact.
I doubt that the Focus partitioning utility (for the IIgs only) has
an option to leave all the data alone and just re-write the partition
table, but it would be very handy.
If you do succeed in attaching it to a PC, it would be interesting
to open it as a device with CiderPress, which accomodates a variety
of partition table formats. Perhaps it would allow an easy capture
of the device's contents.
If I remember, I think ProDOS 8 supports up to 32MB per 'partition' and I
had 5 or 6 partitions on the drive (s7,d1 s7,d2 s1,d1 s1,d2 s4,d1 and
s4,d2 I think were the partitions)
I assume ShrinkIt, or Filer, or any of the ProDOS utility programs will be
able to format it just fine?
Okay, I can not believe 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!!
Excellent--I should have read on!
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?
Don't use FDISK. You will need a IIgs and the Focus Partition utility.
Nothing else will do what you want.
Right now I am just happy to get the data back : )
hmm, maybe CiderPress can partition that physical ibm dha-2270 170mb drive
in 'Focus' format? and partition it accordingly?
It could in principle, but I don't think it has that option...
-michael
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Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
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