Harddisk Replacement

While the 80M Quantum drive worked reasonably well, I noticed the software was continually reading it in disk mode, and not super fast. I was thinking, what if I upgrade that drive to a Flash type drive?

I found a Simpletech 64MB 3.5" flash drive on eBay, and tried to install it. The initial boot showed an error with the drive (as expected), but then after a grueling slow boot from floppy disk 1 in the floppydrive, I went into the disk menu, and issued format to format the harddisk.

A few seconds later, it came back successful.

I turned it off, and on again. Booting -- SUCCESSFULLY!!!

Further investigations.

I booted my PC up using Linux, as I didn't even think windows could do anything usefull with the disk.

I hooked the old drive up to my computer using as USB to IDE interface, but while it saw the drive in dmesg:

[ 860.632401] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning

[ 865.632254] usb-storage: device scan complete

[ 865.632981] scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access QUANTUM ELS85A PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS

[ 865.634086] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).

[ 865.643837] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] READ CAPACITY(16) failed

[ 865.643841] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,

SUGGEST_OK

[ 865.643845] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Use 0xffffffff as device size

[ 865.643850] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] 4294967296 512-byte hardware sectors: (2.19 TB/2.00 TiB)

[ 865.645270] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off

[ 865.645274] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 00 38 00 00

[ 865.645277] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through

[ 865.649336] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).

[ 865.652027] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] READ CAPACITY(16) failed

[ 865.652030] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK

[ 865.652034] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Use 0xffffffff as device size

[ 865.652039] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] 4294967296 512-byte hardware sectors: (2.19 TB/2.00 TiB)

[ 865.653290] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off

[ 865.653293] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 00 38 00 00

[ 865.653295] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through

[ 865.653300] sdd: unknown partition table

[ 865.695678] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk

[ 865.695756] sd 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0

I could not use DD to read it. I had to connect the drive directly to my on board IDE controller.

That worked. Saved off an image. The disk was NOT mountable on my linux system, and I really didn't want to mess it up either.

I tried to mount the image but no success there either.

Opened the file with ghex2, and I noticed it was byteswapped...

So...

file old_image shows: data

used dd to swap it.

dd if=old_image of=new_image conv=swab

Then I was able to look at new_image and saw it had the right format.

Mounted it:

file new_image showed:

hp.img: x86 boot sector

So. The harddisks in a HP16500B do NOT contain a regular partition table, and the bytes on the disk are byteswapped. (Can be explained by the fact that they do use a Motorola 68K microprocessor)

With this knowledge, I was able to mount it

$ mkdir hp

$ sudo mount -o loop -t msdos hp.img hp

$ cd hp

$ ls -lr

total 12

drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 1998-12-15 18:46 system

drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 1996-07-31 15:57 ststem04

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-07-20 22:33 hp10342b

SUCCESS!