I've always had good luck using clonezilla. You could try mounting the drive in a computer that meets clonezilla specs and either make an image in another drive or clone the whole thing.

Unfortunately, that didn't work. It just gives me a no input device error. Like I said, the PC-98 uses a non-standard drive layout compared to a normal IBM PC.

Would you be able to fit the image on a thumb drive? If it's old enough, USB storage is pretty easy to come by that will hold an image of the entire disk.

What I do is boot off a live CD like System Rescue CD. Use a recent-ish computer for best results. But preferably one that has an IDE interface still. Or a PCI card with IDE ports. Or a USB-to-IDE interface. Any of the above work. Boot the CD with the drive attached and it should come up as /dev/sda. Mount your target storage, which should show up as /dev/sdb. Then...

fdisk -l /dev/sda

That will list partitions. If there's a drive overlay program, it might obfuscate things. Hopefully you'll have a partition type of like 0x0c Win95 FAT32 LBA.

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/usb/sda1.img bs=8192

(wait)

There you go. Now you can mount that image file and copy things off of it safely:

mount -o loop /mnt/usb/sda1.img /mnt/tmp
cp -r /mnt/tmp/some_game_folder /mnt/usb/games/

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the thumb drive I have is big enough to store the entire drive. Fyi, I'm attempting all this on my ThinkPad T60 with an IDE to USB adapter. I'll try that System Rescue CD and follow your instructions once it's done downloading and say how it went. The contents of this drive do indeed need to be rescued as soon as possible because I notice sometimes the drive doesn't want to spin up and I have to give it a nudge to do get it to start spinning...

Well, that still won't work. I get an Input/Output error when trying to access it... And just as a reminder, the drive is working (at least at the moment). I can use it perfectly fine with my NEC PC-9821 Cs2 and read files from there, but obviously I have no way of actually backing up the files onto another device when using it on there.

On a real computer use a program called DiskExplorer, it has an option to see the partition of a 9800 hard drive, just hook it up and when you start it from the first time it will tell you to find an image, just click on Cancel, then go to the Extend menu and there's a way to open a physical drive but you must tell it which drive it is

Since the 9821 is common IDE but the format is not compatible I hope that the program would help you in that case

Good luck and BTW, here's the link

https://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA013937/edit … sk/index_e.html

I don't have a real 9800 but at least you can try it to see what happens

Linux or Unix-like based Live CD?

Also, don't use a USB enclosure. Certain low-level hard disk tools won't work on them.

Hmm. You shouldn't get an IO error because of a different disk layout. At the very least the fdisk command should run and show you whether there are (MBR) partitions or not. Provided it is IDE and the jumpers are set correctly, a sector is a sector. At what point did you see the error?

An HDD of that size/age might not work with a USB-IDE adaptor due to lack of LBA.

PC-98 also used a different partition table (not MBR) so you wouldn't be able to see the filesystem from your OS. I'd suggest doing a raw dump of the whole thing, that way you don't miss anything and you have easy means of recreating a bootable HDD for the NEC.

I'll probably try hooking the drive directly into the IDE on my Win98 PC and hopefully something like System Rescue CD (which is a Linux live CD) will run on it. If I can't get anything like that to run on it, I'll try my WinXP PC. It's a Core 2 Duo, so it might be better for this, but it literally only has one IDE on the mobo and it's being taken up by the DVD drive... I'd have to boot using a USB DVD drive.

That's true, w/o LBA, some (most?) of those USB-to-IDE bridges don't work. My Gentoo box will often erroneously recognize them as very large drives (like, several TBs) with my USB adapter. Booting from USB and using the onboard IDE might be a good workaround -- if your BIOS still supports CHS. I've never asked a recent mobo to try, but I would expect it to work.

I dunno how comfortable you are with Linux, but if the drive is even remotely compatible with IDE, you should see something in the boot log. Try these:

dmesg | grep ata
dmesg | grep sd (you'll get some extraneous noise from this weak text search, but you'll get the good stuff too)

You're looking for something like this (obviously not with a 128GB SATA SSD though):

1[    0.764022] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
2[    0.766627] ata1.00: ACPI cmd 00/00:00:00:00:00:a0 (NOP) rejected by device (Stat=0x51 Err=0x04)
3[    0.771285] ata1.00: ATA-8: SAMSUNG SSD PM830 2.5" 7mm 128GB, CXM02D1Q, max UDMA/133
4[    0.771979] ata1.00: 250069680 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32), AA
5[    0.778755] ata1.00: ACPI cmd 00/00:00:00:00:00:a0 (NOP) rejected by device (Stat=0x51 Err=0x04)
6[    0.779553] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
7[    0.781533] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      SAMSUNG SSD PM83 2D1Q PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
8[    0.782473] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
9[    0.782579] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 250069680 512-byte logical blocks: (128 GB/119 GiB)
10[    0.782599] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
11[    0.782600] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
12[    0.782632] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
13[    0.783189]  sda: sda1 sda2 sda3

If you get anything weird, including not being able to get the disk size right, then you're probably better off making other plans.

Assuming you DO get this w/o fatal errors, you will at least have block access to the whole drive. You may not see partitions (the sda1 sda2 sda3 part at the end) if indeed PC98 isn't MBR-compatible, and assuming that Linux kernel wasn't built with any support for whatever the PC98 part table is. If that's the case, you'll have some trouble getting anything specific off it without a utility designed for that purpose, but you'll at least be able to image the disk for safe keeping.

SirNickity wrote:

Assuming you DO get this w/o fatal errors, you will at least have block access to the whole drive. You may not see partitions (the sda1 sda2 sda3 part at the end) if indeed PC98 isn't MBR-compatible, and assuming that Linux kernel wasn't built with any support for whatever the PC98 part table is. If that's the case, you'll have some trouble getting anything specific off it without a utility designed for that purpose, but you'll at least be able to image the disk for safe keeping.

Use a Unix with PC-98 support. FreeBSD has a PC-98 version, ask on their forums whether their partition tools will support PC-98 partitions.
Also have a look at GParted Live, it has support for various systems.

By the way, be very careful with US Windows/DOS tools and data from that hard drive. Due to a lack of Japanese character support they will believe files are corrupt when they're not.

I've been writing a FAT driver in C for fun recently. I've often wondered how typical tools deal with non-Latin character sets. The specs are written such that you need to do case-folding to compare filenames and ensure there's no name collision regardless of case. But, to do that, you need at least the full codepage used on the origin system (which is not recorded anywhere in the filesystem), and preferably full Unicode support when supporting LFNs.

I sincerely doubt DOS and other 90s era tools bother with any of that. I'm not really even sure how far Win9x takes i18n. I haven't tested any of that yet, but I would be pleasantly surprised if they even take into account the basic upper-128 Latin character codes in the most common ISO codepages. They may just ignore case on everything but A-Z. I dunno.

Okay, I finally got around to having another go and I actually did it! I hooked it up directly to the IDE on my Win98 PC's motherboard and that time Linux dd actually worked. Here's some details:

The drive has two partitions:

Partition 1:

Partition 2:

And here's that copy of EVE Burst Error that I extracted from the drive:

I still don't know what the Falcom game is because it gives a different error now about me needing to insert a CD. I wonder what ED4_98 could mean.

But yeah, I'm very relived I've backed up the contents of this drive just in case the drive completely dies. It has quite a bit of stuff on it, and a lot of it is a complete mystery to me. Sorry about me using an IDE to USB adapter earlier, and thanks for the help from all of you. 😀

thepirategamerboy12 wrote:

I still don't know what the Falcom game is because it gives a different error now about me needing to insert a CD. I wonder what ED4_98 could mean.

I think it's Eiyū Densetsu IV Akai Shizuku, aka The Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion.

Hey, congrats man! 😀 The USB adapter thing got me too. I never thought about it before that, and just assumed IDE was IDE. Live and learn.