Back in the days, I do remember that there was an option to "unstack" a HDD. It would take a long time though...

I take it the HDD is IDE and that Toshiba is a notebook?

What you can do is get a notebook to desktop IDE adapter and then connect the HDD into a modern PC and boot it up.

Then you can copy everything onto another HDD or CF card.

You could also use a parallel port ZIP 100 drive at this point.

If acronis allows taking the image and saving it as a virtual machine image, then you could use this inside Virtual PC or Virtual Machine. But I'm just thinking aloud at this point...

HDD is indeed IDS 2.5" and the Toshiba is a notebook. I have an adapter and can indeed connect the disk to a modern PC but as the HDD is bust I would need to clone it to a new one first. Would a modern PC boot up ? I would have thought there were many hardware components that would not have been supported in DOS v5.

eugeneg wrote:

but as the HDD is bust I would need to clone it to a new one first.

No worries, Acronis is excellent at cloning from one drive to the other...

Would a modern PC boot up ?

Totally!

IDE and all of that is still the same. DOS runs on modern machines without any issues. I admit I have only tried Dos 6, but I don't see Dos 5 being any different...

And the BIOS detects these drives just fine as well...

I tried making a 2GB FAT partition on a data disk and marked it active. But the boot selection menu doesn't offer that as an option. Do I need to fix the boot loader ? How ?

Perhaps I need to make that the only partition on the disk ? Wouldn't have thought so but I'm a long way short of knowledgeable about this.

No need for partition, just clone the HDD and it will do all that for you.

No - I'm afraid this isn't working. I have an initialized but unformatted 1TB disk and use Acronis (in Disk mode) to recover the image (including the disk signature). That creates a 2GB FAT active partition with the data on, but when I try to boot from it I just bet a blank screen with flashing cursor.

I think to use another PC would require a boot loader that can understand DOS 5 and that's technically beyond me. My initial posssibilities for recovering the files from the failed laptop were:

• Find a replacement Floppy and HDD then copy to floppies
• Replace the HDD then boot off it and delete all unwanted files then uninstall Stacker, remove hard disk and copy using another PC
• Install the image on a real or virtual other computer that has a working USB port
• Write a program to decrypt the stacker volume or search for shareware
• Send the drive to a data recovery company (too expensive)
• Clone the hard disk to a larger model then unstack in situ, move hard disk to other PC with USB

I wonder if any of these are possibilities.

Have you tried booting off the notebook drive (sticking it into the desktop).

And then copy the files onto another HDD, parallel port ZIP or onto floppies.

I haven't tried that, partly because the original HDD is very flakey and partly because getting it out of the laptop is such a chore.

I'll try that now as I have no better option.

I have tried booting off a new disk in a modern PC and also the original Toshiba, but there is just a blank screen.

I may be able to get a DOS boot CD but will Stacker be included by default ?

Did you already tried Dosbox, load the stacker driver and mount the disk image file as drive d: ?
Then you could copy simply the stuff to c: that could be some mounted resource of your usual drive.

Some common virtual machine would work probably too instead of dosbox.
I have some Win98 running in VirtualPC f.e. so loading a stacker driver there would be just one more line in the config.sys file.

As a side note: To boot DOS on a modern PC set SATA emulation to legacy. In native mode DOS seems to hang on bootup on some systems.

If you would do it on a modern real PC, you probably require to load NTFSDOS to get your main HD readable for DOS and mount then the Stacker Volume. Also the usual BIOS function scale only up to LBA28.

I'm surprised this is so tricky.

I hooked up this old HDD, from that 486 I got, onto the IDE controller of my Phenom 2 machine and it just worked.

I did unplug all the SATA devices though...

The CF cards (which are formatted as FAT16 under DOS 6.22) also just work.

If you are getting a blank screen, I think your boot order might not be correct. What other storage devices does that PC have?

And did that old HDD show up in the BIOS?

elianda wrote:

Did you already tried Dosbox, load the stacker driver and mount the disk image file as drive d: ?
Then you could copy simply the stuff to c: that could be some mounted resource of your usual drive.

My current line of attack is to run DOSBox and try to copy from the stacker compressed drive to another. However, how can I load the stacker driver ? The last two lines of CONFIG.SYS are

1DEVICE=C:\STACKER\STACKER.COM A:
2DEVICE=C:\STACKER\SSWAP.COM

But there is no way to replicate that in DOSBox that I can see. So my question is how can I load the Stacker driver and mount the disk image ?

You can't load block device drivers in dosbox directly.

Can you mount the disk image in dosbox? Then it's merely a matter of booting the image.
If you can't, try to figure out if the format can be converted.

If everything else fails create a big-enough bootable clean disk image, copy the stacker software
from the HD image and edit the config.sys of the bootabke image to load the stacker driver.
Then boot off that image.

wd wrote:

Can you mount the disk image in dosbox? Then it's merely a matter of booting the image.

Sure, I have a real disk on F: which contains the image I would like to boot, but neither of the modern PCs I have tried will boot off it.
In DOSBox I can
MOUNT F: F:\
But when you say that it's merely a matter of booting it, how can I do that ?

wd wrote:

You can't load block device drivers in dosbox directly.

Does something like DEVLOD work in DOSBox?
http://www.jimkyle.com/download.htm
http://drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=18 … iteSectionName=

eugeneg wrote:

But when you say that it's merely a matter of booting it, how can I do that ?

There is a "boot" command documented in the DOSBox readme. However, in order to use that, you'll need a disk image in a format that DOSBox can understand, and I'm not sure how you would make that from a real hard disk.

I have a real disk on F: which contains the image I would like to boot

Ok just mounting that F: won't help (dosbox will only access files, things like partition table
and boot sector are not visible to dosbox).

If you find some tool that can create .img files from a real harddisk, you can use the
dosbox imgmount command to mount and boot such an image file.

You might be able to mount the acronis image to a drive letter using Acronis and then use Winimage to make a .img.

or just connect the physical HD to the computer and make a .img using Winimage.

You are likely better off just booting Acronis in VPC/Vmware/Virtualbox and restoring the image using those VM's than messing around with DOSBox. (Assuming VPC/Vmware/Virtualbox is compatible with Stacker)

Stacker is a pure software layer so that should not be any problem if the image can be booted in any VM.

I have had some success with a similar problem using VIrtualbox.

You can map a physical disk and boot from it.