VOGONS


First post, by feipoa

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I have this Adaptec AHA-2842A VLB SCSI card in a 486. I ran out of HDD's during the build, so I used an Ultra320 , 146 GB drive and made two 4 GB partitions. Well, now I want my 146 U320 HDD back for a new build. I have a noisy 73 GB u320 drive I'd like to clone the data onto. When I hook both HDD's up to the AHA-2842A and load Norton Ghost 2003 from a bootable diskette, it doesn't seem to have the proper SCSI drivers. The VLB 2842A uses ASPI7.DOS or something like that, which wasn't very common and was probably omitted from something so new as Ghost 2003, although Ghost does have the drivers for the AHA-1540, which was very common.

I pulled the two drives out and put them into a Tualatin Ultra320 system I have, ran Ghost a bootable diskette, cloned, then put the cloned HDD back into the 486, but it won't boot Win95. Missing operating system. This probably has something to do with how the SCSI host adapter in the Tualatin system uses a different translation scheme compared to the AHA-2842A. So how do I clone these drives? Seems to me that the best (only?) way to do this properly is the clone the HDD's from within the 486 containing the AHA-2842A.

Anyone know what software will do this? Is there a version of Clonezilla which still contains old VLB drives for the AHA-2842A?

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 1 of 20, by Vipersan

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I've never tried SCSI with this software ...but it claims to work.
https://www.miray.de/public/documents/HDClone … _Data_Sheet.pdf
HDclone from Miray ...will make RAW images of just about any hard drive I have used with it..but as I said ..never tried SCSI.
good luck.
rgds
VS

Reply 2 of 20, by Disruptor

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I don't have had problems with my EISA 2740W using ASPI7DOS.SYS and DOS based Ghost 2003. My translation is C-255-63. I don't have created partitions beyond the 8 GB limit.
What translations are in your partition sectors?

Reply 3 of 20, by stamasd

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Can you use a Linux boot disk on your 486 system? Even a minimal system, as long as it has the "dd" command and drivers for your SCSI card. One I can think of is an older Slackware boot/root disk set such as https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slack … s.144/aha2x4x.s for bootdisk and https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slack … otdsks/color.gz for root disk. You can write the above files to FDDs with rawrite https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slack … s/RAWRITE13.EXE then use them to boot and use the dd program to make a bit-by-bit copy of one HDD to another. It may take some time.

I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O

Reply 4 of 20, by feipoa

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Disruptor wrote:

I don't have had problems with my EISA 2740W using ASPI7DOS.SYS and DOS based Ghost 2003. My translation is C-255-63. I don't have created partitions beyond the 8 GB limit.
What translations are in your partition sectors?

It is supposed to use 255 head / 63 sector. When I copy the HDD using an Ultra2LVD controller, I get an error when putting the HDD back into my 486. The error is " A drive larger than 1 gigabyte has been detected with 64 head / 32 sector partitioning. this drive is not compatible with the 255 head / 63 sector translation which has been enabled on this adapter. Data could be corrupted. Pelse check yoru system setup!"

If I use the Ultra320 controller to clone the drive, I do not get this error, but when it tried to POST, I get "inaccessable system disk" or something to that effect.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 5 of 20, by PC Hoarder Patrol

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Not sure if this will help, but can't you just manually edit the NG2003 bootable diskette to include the required drivers

https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH107936.html

Reply 6 of 20, by feipoa

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stamasd wrote:

Can you use a Linux boot disk on your 486 system? Even a minimal system, as long as it has the "dd" command and drivers for your SCSI card. One I can think of is an older Slackware boot/root disk set such as https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slack … s.144/aha2x4x.s for bootdisk and https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slack … otdsks/color.gz for root disk. You can write the above files to FDDs with rawrite https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slack … s/RAWRITE13.EXE then use them to boot and use the dd program to make a bit-by-bit copy of one HDD to another. It may take some time.

Will this work considering the HDD to be coppied is 147 GB and the new HDD is 73 GB? I'm not savvy with Linux.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 7 of 20, by feipoa

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PC Hoarder Patrol wrote:

Not sure if this will help, but can't you just manually edit the NG2003 bootable diskette to include the required drivers

https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH107936.html

That is a good point. I just checked my Ghost diskette and ASPI7DOS.SYS is not included. I've added it to the diskette. Is that all I need to do? Disruptor, is that all you did?

Also, I recall with these VLB SCSI controllers that there is often a jumper or dip switch that you must set if you are using more than 2 devices. I have 3: the two HDD's and a SCSI CD-ROM, which also acts as the terminator. I couldn't find anything in the manual concerning using more than 2 devices for this particular card though. It is mentioend for the AHA-2825 though, which has a more detailed manual.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 8 of 20, by stamasd

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feipoa wrote:

Will this work considering the HDD to be coppied is 147 GB and the new HDD is 73 GB? I'm not savvy with Linux.

Hm that would be a problem. The dd method works with HDDs that are the same size, or the one copied to being larger than the original. Sorry I only skimmed the original post and missed the sizes.
However now I read back the original post and see that you only have 2 partitions of 4GB each that you want to copy. In that case as long as the receiving drive is larger than 8GB it should work. It should also make the copy time shorter as it would allow you to skip copying the empty portion of the original drive.

Last edited by stamasd on 2018-09-14, 13:17. Edited 1 time in total.

I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O

Reply 9 of 20, by feipoa

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Well, there are only two 4 GB partitions, so the rest is wasted anyway.

OK, adding ASPI7DOS.SYS to the GHOST diskette did nothing. How to tell the GHOST diskette to use ASPI7DOS.SYS?

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 10 of 20, by stamasd

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feipoa wrote:

Well, there are only two 4 GB partitions, so the rest is wasted anyway.

Yes I just realized that. See my edit above. Let me know if you want to try the dd method and I can assist.

I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O

Reply 11 of 20, by Disruptor

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feipoa wrote:

Disruptor, is that all you did?

I used my MS-DOS 6.22 and did not load any driver but ASPI7DOS.SYS
I did not use the boot disk.

Perhaps it helps to use a hex editor and zero all bytes in partition sector.
Then cold boot the computer.

Reply 12 of 20, by NJRoadfan

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Ghost shouldn't need any ASPI drivers to see the hard drives, those are all handled by the ROM's Int 13h driver. This used to be a problem all the time with Ghost when I did computer repair. Make sure the entire disk is copied over and not just the partition. Also Ghost should run directly on the 486.

Reply 13 of 20, by hyoenmadan

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NJRoadfan wrote:

Ghost shouldn't need any ASPI drivers to see the hard drives, those are all handled by the ROM's Int 13h driver. This used to be a problem all the time with Ghost when I did computer repair. Make sure the entire disk is copied over and not just the partition. Also Ghost should run directly on the 486.

INT13H SCSI support only works for the bootable drive, although sometimes it also handles the second drive too. And depending of ROM implementation, the support only gets enabled when you boot from the drive, which isn't the case when you use a bootdisk. It really depends how the manufacturer implemented their INT13H support.

Reply 14 of 20, by feipoa

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Disruptor wrote:
I used my MS-DOS 6.22 and did not load any driver but ASPI7DOS.SYS I did not use the boot disk. […]
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feipoa wrote:

Disruptor, is that all you did?

I used my MS-DOS 6.22 and did not load any driver but ASPI7DOS.SYS
I did not use the boot disk.

Perhaps it helps to use a hex editor and zero all bytes in partition sector.
Then cold boot the computer.

Oh, I didn't realise you could boot with MS DOS 6.22 and then execute a file on the ghost boot disk from within DOS. Is this what you are doing? Or is there more to it?

stamasd wrote:
feipoa wrote:

Well, there are only two 4 GB partitions, so the rest is wasted anyway.

Yes I just realized that. See my edit above. Let me know if you want to try the dd method and I can assist.

Yes, if the easier approaches fail.

hyoenmadan wrote:
NJRoadfan wrote:

Ghost shouldn't need any ASPI drivers to see the hard drives, those are all handled by the ROM's Int 13h driver. This used to be a problem all the time with Ghost when I did computer repair. Make sure the entire disk is copied over and not just the partition. Also Ghost should run directly on the 486.

INT13H SCSI support only works for the bootable drive, although sometimes it also handles the second drive too. And depending of ROM implementation, the support only gets enabled when you boot from the drive, which isn't the case when you use a bootdisk. It really depends how the manufacturer implemented their INT13H support.

Any chance INT13h support in the SCSI BIOS is messing things up? Should I disable it?
If I remove all the SCSI DOS drives from the Ghost boot diskette, I get some weird low level errors on screen, that is, with INT13h still enabled.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 15 of 20, by hyoenmadan

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feipoa wrote:

Any chance INT13h support in the SCSI BIOS is messing things up? Should I disable it?
If I remove all the SCSI DOS drives from the Ghost boot diskette, I get some weird low level errors on screen, that is, with INT13h still enabled.

Would be possible. Specially with Adaptec stuff (never heard problems with Buslogic/Milex/LSI cards). Many mail lists in the past were filled complaining how buggy were certain revisions of these Adaptec ROMs.

Whatever... Only way to know would be testing such option. Disable INT13H support and use the DOS ASPI drivers to access the disk. As far as i know for Ghost is enough with the ASPI manager (aspi7dos.sys) and the ASPI HBA driver loaded (seems adaptec drivers include the HBA code and the ASPI Manager in the same binary). No need to load aspidisk.sys. It is only required if you want to access the disk partitions via a DOS letters, which Ghost doesn't need at all.

Reply 16 of 20, by feipoa

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OK. It looks like the ghost disk has a hidden config.sys file. I was able to add aspi7dos.sys to it. It loaded successfully when booting from the Ghost boot disk. I am now able to access both HDD's in Ghost.

Ghost does mention that the HDD may not work with large HDD sizes. The Adaptec BIOS also spits out this warning. See attached. This all started when I tried to clone the drive previously using an ISA 1542CP card. Now each time I put the destination HDD in the system, I get this translation scheme message. Luckily, the source HDD is fine. So it looks like the ISA 1542CP card messed up the translation.

My question is, how do I fix that? Will clonning the HDD using the target SCSI card (2842A VLB) fix it, or is the translation stuck on 64 head / 32 sector? fdisk /mbr ? low-level format? Or will the clonning adjust the translation to 255 head / 63 sector?

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Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 17 of 20, by feipoa

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OK, so the clone was successful concerning the translation scheme. It went back to 255/63. However, I am left with the original problem. With the cloned drive, I go to boot, it shows the NT boot menu, I select WIndows 95, press enter, then I get "Invalid System Disk" "Replace the disk, then press any key". MBR messed up? Or something to do with how NT4's boot loader is reading the W95 partition's boot sector. How to fix this?

EDIT: This is starting to feel kinda familiar. I feel like I've run into this before and received help. Is this the solution:
Re: The Ultimate Multi-Boot Windows Benching Machine

EDIT2: And I sorta recall this happening if the clone HDD isn't exactly the same size. The issue doesn't occur when the HDD"s are identical.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 18 of 20, by feipoa

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Alright, memory fuzzy, but came back. The issue was the missing copy of the boot sector for NT4 to see. So with the cloned HDD, I booted into NT4 and ran:

dd if=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 of=bootsect.w95 bs=512 count=1

All is back to normal. Half of this was a memory forgetting excercise, while the other half, at least I got my Adaptec AHA 2842A VL working with Norton Ghost, which had always bugged me that it didn't!

Thanks all for your help!

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 19 of 20, by Disruptor

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feipoa wrote:

My question is, how do I fix that? Will clonning the HDD using the target SCSI card (2842A VLB) fix it, or is the translation stuck on 64 head / 32 sector? fdisk /mbr ? low-level format? Or will the clonning adjust the translation to 255 head / 63 sector?

Disruptor wrote:

Perhaps it helps to use a hex editor and zero all bytes in partition sector.
Then cold boot the computer.

As I have mentioned, clear the partition sector (MBR). It does not need a full low-level format.
That should get you rid of the translation issues.
After reboot your controller's BIOS should apply the default translation (should be 255/63).
Then you should be able to restore your image - as you did.

To capture sectors, I use Norton Utilities NU.EXE Version 4.50 Advanced Edition.
(I know that it has a display bug with translation schemes that use more than 99 heads.)