It’s old enough that LBA28 addressing isn’t guaranteed so you may need to connect it to a device that can do CHS addressing. Devices built after 2010 often lack the ability to use the older modes and only do LBA addressing. If the LBA support isn’t there or is buggy, you would need to get a usb-ide device built before 2008, or you need to plug it into a computer that has BIOS, not UEFI.

The drive is probably new enough to know the ATA info command, which would let your computer autodetect the Cylinders, Heads and Sectors per track to use on the device. That would be ideal.

The physical Cylinder and Head info is in this link, but thats the physical layout, and unlikely to be what was used when the drive was last partitioned/formatted . Hard drives in this era rarely used the physical layout. https://www.arvutimuuseum.ee/th99/h/txt/3245.txt

Edit: after reading the th99 docs, looks like it might support LBA28 addressing, but if it was partitioned while using CHS, you might need to force CHS addressing to read the existing data.

douglar wrote on 2025-01-03, 04:33:

It’s old enough that LBA28 addressing isn’t guaranteed so you may need to connect it to a device that can do CHS addressing. De […]
Show full quote

It’s old enough that LBA28 addressing isn’t guaranteed so you may need to connect it to a device that can do CHS addressing. Devices built after 2010 often lack the ability to use the older modes and only do LBA addressing. If the LBA support isn’t there or is buggy, you would need to get a usb-ide device built before 2008, or you need to plug it into a computer that has BIOS, not UEFI.

The drive is probably new enough to know the ATA info command, which would let your computer autodetect the Cylinders, Heads and Sectors per track to use on the device. That would be ideal.

The physical Cylinder and Head info is in this link, but thats the physical layout, and unlikely to be what was used when the drive was last partitioned/formatted . Hard drives in this era rarely used the physical layout. https://www.arvutimuuseum.ee/th99/h/txt/3245.txt

Edit: after reading the th99 docs, looks like it might support LBA28 addressing, but if it was partitioned while using CHS, you might need to force CHS addressing to read the existing data.

thanks, i have tried a bunch of USB adaptors and cables...no luck
i used a converter from sata to 44-ide . the pc bios sees the drive sometimes, but it can see it in window

i did a similar drive a while back.. but i cant remember how.. as it was a btch to figure out.

if i used a older desktop it would have to still have been with sata to 44-ide so it wouldnt be that old a pc.... and if i didnt use sata to 44-ide i dont know how i would have connected it

in an older desktop
i have used a ide to ide44 converter i found
i cant see the drive in my computer, the system has windows xp. but i can see it in system devices (Unu atn26)
if i f8 boot to dos, i can see the drive and read it. DIR, etc
but i need to disktovhd in windows for ease. / usb

in bios drive comes up as Unu atn26, i can also manual set it to CHS

any ideas?

Lara wrote on 2025-01-03, 07:17:

in an older desktop i have used a ide to ide44 converter i found i cant see the drive in my computer, the system has windows xp. […]
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in an older desktop
i have used a ide to ide44 converter i found
i cant see the drive in my computer, the system has windows xp. but i can see it in system devices (Unu atn26)
if i f8 boot to dos, i can see the drive and read it. DIR, etc
but i need to disktovhd in windows for ease. / usb

in bios drive comes up as Unu atn26, i can also manual set it to CHS

any ideas?

Some people have reported that there are early usb-ide adaptors that work. Your best luck is looking for a usb device that was manufactured before 2005.

These threads might be interesting to you:
IDE to USB adapter for VERY old hard drives
An IDE disk initialized on an older machine is inaccessible on my late model pc

I suggest imaging the drive on the older XP machine using something like qemu-img , 32-bit builds of version 2.7.0 and older of qemu should work under XP (dated 2016/09/03 and earlier) [1].

With the qemu-img utility (should be included), you can create either a VHD directly (not sure if that old a version supports it) or at least a raw image which you can then copy over to the new machine on a USB flash drive. Of course, you could alternatively use another imaging application that works under Windows XP as long it can generate either a VHD file directly or an image in a file format that can be converted to VHD (since that is the end goal, AFAIU). Modern versions of qemu-img under Linux or Windows will allow conversion between raw and VHD and other formats (and there are other utilities/applications that can do this).

[1]
https://qemu.weilnetz.de/w32/2016/qemu-w32-se … up-20160903.exe

thanks
what i dont understand is why can i boot the drive and F8 to to dos mode, (95 os)
but i cant boot into XP on another disk and see the drive (as a second or on usb) in windows, it only shows in device manager as Unu atn26.
if i try run diskpart it fails to run in CMD

Lara wrote on 2025-01-04, 03:01:

thanks what i dont understand is why can i boot the drive and F8 to to dos mode, (95 os) but i cant boot into XP on another di […]
Show full quote

thanks
what i dont understand is why can i boot the drive and F8 to to dos mode, (95 os)
but i cant boot into XP on another disk and see the drive (as a second or on usb) in windows, it only shows in device manager as Unu atn26.
if i try run diskpart it fails to run in CMD

The drive was likely partitioned and formatted while using CHS addressing and the USB device and XP are likely using LBA addressing. That or you got a proprietary disk overlay on the drive. Or maybe you just have old fashioned mbr virus. The last two things are very similar.

Lara wrote on 2025-01-04, 03:01:

thanks what i dont understand is why can i boot the drive and F8 to to dos mode, (95 os) but i cant boot into XP on another di […]
Show full quote

thanks
what i dont understand is why can i boot the drive and F8 to to dos mode, (95 os)
but i cant boot into XP on another disk and see the drive (as a second or on usb) in windows, it only shows in device manager as Unu atn26.
if i try run diskpart it fails to run in CMD

It seems odd to me that the drive boots fine (and its data is accessible) when connected to the onboard IDE controller yet somehow appears weird in device manager when plugged into the same IDE controller and booted into Windows off of another drive.

Maybe the IDE controller driver in Windows is making some wrong guesses assumption about the Quantum drive whereas under DOS, the drive being accessed through BIOS routines works fine.

If the drive data being unaccessible under Windows XP is due to a drive overlay or a boot sector virus (as suggested by Douglar), it should still be possible to make a raw image of the drive unless, as I am now wondering, the IDE controller driver in Windows is at least partly to blame.

What motherboard (brand and model)/IDE controller is the Quantum drive being connected to and is the XP boot drive being connected as a master or slave on the same cable when both drives are connected and the system is booted into XP ?

"If the drive data being unaccessible under Windows XP is due to a drive overlay or a boot sector virus (as suggested by Douglar), it should still be possible to make a raw image of the drive unless, as I am now wondering, the IDE controller driver in Windows is at least partly to blame."

weird thing is the SSD in the test pc died when i was trying to get this all to work, i put it down to maybe a power issue or something from plugging so much different stuff in and out with random external docks etc.
also the spare hard disk had boot issues (both clone of the os win10) i wonder if a virus could do this? i have never seen a MBR virus. but if i put the old disk back in the old laptop aero 4/33 it boots to windows 95 ok.

"What motherboard (brand and model)/IDE controller is the Quantum drive being connected to and is the XP boot drive being connected as a master or slave on the same cable when both drives are connected and the system is booted into XP "
i tried lots of stuff.
master IDE cable: on its own (tried to boot to win95)
master IDE cable with windows xp hdd and the old drive on the secondary IDE cable
with ide to ide44
and also on sata to ide 44 adaptor

most ways i can see the drive, but not in windows

"The drive was likely partitioned and formatted while using CHS addressing and the USB device and XP are likely using LBA addressing."
is there a way to see this?

i know these old laptops use a weird bios partition on the disk and i spent ages truing to do a true clone on a CF. but that's another story (in my other posts)

Can you boot from an old DOS antivirus floppy like F-Prot?

https://archive.org/details/fprot_dos_316f

MBR virus such as Monkey virus encrypts the partition information in the MBR making it inaccessible if
booted from an uninfected disk.
if you suspect you have a MBR virus, try using my portable antivirus from the link to the thread below
Sharing my portable DOS Antivirus for 286+
you can put it on a floppy disk or on the same hard disk. take note that it can perform boot sector/MBR repairs under plain DOS only
if it detects a boot/MBR virus chances are it can be repaired or disabled even if it's active in memory
best of luck

good thing i brought that usb floppy drive 🤣, ill give this a try for fun, but i doubt its a virus. it boots without issue in the original laptop win95\dos

Lara wrote on 2025-01-05, 02:18:

good thing i brought that usb floppy drive 🤣, ill give this a try for fun, but i doubt its a virus. it boots without issue in the original laptop win95\dos

If you got the monkey virus, your computer still boots, but you can only see your encrypted volume when you boot from the infected mbr. If you boot from a clean mbr or gpt, the infected volume is inaccessible.

is it possible is there was a old MBR virus on the old disc? could it damage my pc main boot ssd? running windows 10 ?

i cannot get the ssd to read anymore, it just drops out as soon as i access it after it loads on usb or sata as a 2nd disk?

Lara wrote on 2025-01-09, 08:31:

is it possible is there was a old MBR virus on the old disc? could it damage my pc main boot ssd? running windows 10 ?

i cannot get the ssd to read anymore, it just drops out as soon as i access it after it loads on usb or sata as a 2nd disk?

I've seen two hard drives with viruses since 2020. Once on a 286 from ebay. Once from a 486 from the trash. Both drives booted. Both made a mess because it got all over my floppies and gotek floppy images. Had to scrub all of them that the system touched or it kept coming back days or weeks later. F-prot worked for me and didn't cause data loss.

Yes, I could see a vintage 1990 MBR virus mangling the partition table on a sata ssd. You could try using "fdisk /mbr" in DOS or diskpart.exe in >=NT to rewrite it.

what are the symptoms of the MBR virus? i cannot even access the disk to scan it? im think this is more a dead disk.
hard to tell with ssd.
if i connect ssd to a usb interface, it will load in windows. pop up the drive then if i try click into anything i hangs... the moment ia d/c the drive it will load folder then crash

A symptom I expect for an MBR virus would be that you can only see your data partitions when you boot from a device with an MBR that is infected with the same virus. If the virus isn’t loaded, you don’t see your partitions.

These guys were also real mode only, so if your computer enters a protected mode only OS like XP, your partitions would also likely disappear.

But back in the day there were a lot of MBR viruses and they didn’t all work the same.

Also it is worth noting that a 1988 MBR virus might not work as the authors intended if it tries to infect a sata device that is 30 years newer and configured with a partition table type that had not been invented yet. So there’s certainly room for unexpected behaviors.

thanks,
how would i know the difference between a MBR virus and a dead SSD? is there a basic test i can run to know if the data is gone due to fault or virus affected?
it will connect and load up, but any time i try open anything its hangs.
it wont boot off the ssd anymore, goes into windows recovery

Boot from floppy with a DOS based anti-virus program like F-Prot