Re: GS hard drive to image file?

[Andy McFadden <fadden@fadden.com>]

Brian Peek <peekb@nycap.rr.com> wrote:
> I'm just about to dig my GS out of my parents basement this week and I'm not 
> sure how the hard drive is going to fare.  It was having some issues when it 
> was put away almost 10 years ago, so I'm not holding my breath.  However, if 
> I CAN get it going, I would like to make an image of that drive, transfer it 
> to my PC, and be able to use it with KEGS or a similar emulator.  Or, at the 
> very least, transfer it to my PC to keep as a backup.
> 
> I haven't found any definitive documentation in my searching so far that 
> tells me this is even possible.  I was hoping someone here might be able to 
> shed some light on the situation.

If it's an external hard drive, and you have a PC with a compatible
interface (e.g. SCSI card), you can use CiderPress to create a block image
of the entire drive.  This is the fastest and least-hassle approach, but
it may not work for all drives (e.g. InnerDrive or Vulcan), and if your
drive is SCSI you will need a SCSI interface on the PC.

Another approach is to create an image of each partition using a disk image
program (DiskMaker) from SheppyWare (www.sheppyware.net).  If you have a
2GB drive with a bunch of ProDOS partitions and one large HFS partition,
this works out pretty well, because you can copy images of the ProDOS
areas onto HFS.  The partitions can be used directly by KEGS.

If neither of these is sounding appealing, you can try to buy a CFFA
card for your Apple II, and volume-copy the partitions onto the CF card.
These can then be extracted with CiderPress.

Yet another approach is to use GS/ShrinkIt to create a file archive with
the contents of each partition, assuming you have sufficient free space.
GSHK will compress things down, so you can fit quite a bit more.  The
archives can be transferred through a serial connection, and you can use
CiderPress to transform them from a file archive into a disk image.


If it sounds like I'm pushing CiderPress a lot, you have to understand
that CiderPress exists to solve these sorts of problems.  The failure
of an 80MB hard drive (death by stiction) is what inspired me to write
NuLib2 and CiderPress.  Pulling stuff out of 32MB file archives is not
a job I would want to handle with the original NuLib.

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