Sector Copy Backup of HD (compact flash)

[+Larry]

Has anyone successfully used Norton/Symantec Ghost to back up their Atari compact flash drive (or an actual HD)?

 

Likewise, has anyone used "Dolly" an MS-Dos sector copier for the same purpose? Since Dolly apparently only works with IDE channels, it would be necessary to have access to the IDE port on the motherboard -- typically a cable hanging out the front of the computer.

 

Or has someone found another way?

 

Why? Time -- it takes 45 minutes to an hour using an Atari and APE to copy about 40,000 DD sectors using my Action! sector copier. That is not even a full partition. And even 30 minutes or so using a ZIP drive to backup my BB HD. Not horrendously long, but I'm determined to find a faster method.

 

-Larry

[Rybags]

Maybe give CloneZilla a try http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/

 

If file system is supported (ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, fat, ntfs), only used blocks in harddisk are saved and restored. This increase the clone efficiency. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.

Edited April 14, 2007 by Rybags

[+Larry]

Maybe give CloneZilla a try http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/

 

If file system is supported (ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, fat, ntfs), only used blocks in harddisk are saved and restored. This increase the clone efficiency. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.

 

Thanks, I had not heard of Clonezilla -- nice name! I'll check it out.

-Larry

[Goochman]

Larry,

 

Please post your results if you dont mind

[+Larry]

Larry,

 

Please post your results if you dont mind

 

No problem. I've looked over "Clonezilla Live" and it's not for me.

 

-Larry

[+kheller2]

if you have access to a Unix system, just "dd" the drive to a file or another drive.

[Mathy]

Howdy Larry

 

Writing a very crued sectorcopier for ASPI wouldn't be much of a problem. So anyone who's ever written something for ASPI could write one.

 

Unfortunately, my system isn't up yet (I tried to get everything to work, but at the end, non of my HDD's responded. ) so I can not write one for you. I've you've ever tried my CD/DVD reader, you might know how fast data can be read. By the time you see "reading data" (or something like that) appears, data has already been read and is being processed. On a sectorcopier, you'ld just have to read from one medium and write to the other.

 

Greetings

 

Mathy

 

PS for those who haven't bookmarked it yet http://www.mathyvannisselroy.nl

[ijor]

if you have access to a Unix system, just "dd" the drive to a file or another drive.

 

Right, and if you only have Windows, there are several "dd like" utilities available as well.

 

Ghost can certainly be used for this purpose.

Edited April 14, 2007 by ijor

[+Larry]

Howdy Larry

 

Writing a very crued sectorcopier for ASPI wouldn't be much of a problem. So anyone who's ever written something for ASPI could write one.

 

Unfortunately, my system isn't up yet (I tried to get everything to work, but at the end, non of my HDD's responded. ) so I can not write one for you. I've you've ever tried my CD/DVD reader, you might know how fast data can be read. By the time you see "reading data" (or something like that) appears, data has already been read and is being processed. On a sectorcopier, you'ld just have to read from one medium and write to the other.

 

Greetings

 

Mathy

 

PS for those who haven't bookmarked it yet http://www.mathyvannisselroy.nl

 

Hi Mathy-

Since you say ASPI, I presume you are talking about software for the PC. If worst comes to worst, I'll dig out my PC manuals and have a go at it. The POWER BASIC guys already gave me some hints on how to do it with their stuff. But "rolling my own" isn't at the top of my list. I can buy a nice one for 83 euros -- menu driven, etc. Cheaper would be better, but if I can't find something suitable, I'll pay it. I just don't care for command line software.

-Larry

[Mathy]

Hello Larry

 

Maybe I should have said ATASPI. Or ASPI for the 8 bit Atari. You have looked at my Internet site before I hope.

 

I don't do PC's. I do Atari 8 bit, and use an Apple Imac to get on the net.

 

Greetings

 

Mathy

[+Larry]

Hello Larry

 

Maybe I should have said ATASPI. Or ASPI for the 8 bit Atari. You have looked at my Internet site before I hope.

 

I don't do PC's. I do Atari 8 bit, and use an Apple Imac to get on the net.

 

Greetings

 

Mathy

 

Hi Mathy-

 

I see, ATASPI -- for the A8. I didn't know that you have a web site...

 

But I don't see how ATASPI would improve on the performance (speed) of a ML copier. I presume the data must still go through the Atari. (?)

I ran a couple of tests this AM. Backing up the BB hard drive (40,000 sectors) to another partition on the same drive with the Black Box Taskmaster took 22 minutes. Backing up the BB hard drive to a ZIP SCSI drive took 27 minutes. Certainly faster than to an APE image, but still pretty slow. Unfortunately using a IDE-SCSI converter with a compact flash drive, I can't even do that, since there is only one IDE device allowed on the converter. I've never tried two converters set to different ID's.

 

However, I did find "dd for Windows," and though it is command line driven, it looks very promising. There is a nice built-in safety filter so that there is virtually no chance of wiping out the all-important C: drive. And it only requires a few parameters and switches. I'm not ready to pronounce it a success yet, but it certainly looks good thus far. And its 32-bit, so it runs fine in a dos box on XP. Thanks, ijor.

 

-Larry

[Mathy]

Hello Larry

 

"Problem" with most software is that it has to go thrue the floppy emulation part of the BlackBox. Meaning the part that chops 512 byte sectors into 256 byte sectors and vice versa. That takes time.

 

With ATASPI you can directly access the data on the drive. Meaning you can copy each 512 byte (or more, optical drives use 2048 byte per sector) sector as a whole. Include the (two times) three bytes at the end of each sector. If somebody would write a copier for ATASPI (remember, with an ASPI manager for different harddrive interfaces, these tools would also run on those hard drives), you could grab sectors directly off the hard drive. Combine that with some nice RAMdisk support, and you can copy data really, really fast. For an 8 bit Atari that is.

 

Maybe, just maybe, there might be an even faster way:

I'm not sure if it would work on the BlackBox, but SCSI (and maybe even IDE) has a really nice trick. There is a SCSI command that tells a drive to copy sectors from one drive to another. Meaning you could tell one SCSI device, to copy stuff to another SCSI device. Better yet IIRC you can tell drive A to copy sectors from drive B to drive C. BTW where I say "drive" you should read: "SCSI storage device". Haven't tried that out yet.

 

Greetings

 

Mathy

[+Larry]

Well, the case is closed, at least for me. After working for an hour or so trying to get all the "dd" command line switches and parameters correct, I threw in the towel. I purchased the very nice, very, very flexible sector copier for the PC. It is called HDClone (Professional Edition) from Miray Software in Germany. Total time to backup and verify my BB hard drive (compact flash): less than one minute!!! Exceedingly nice piece of software.

-Larry

[+kheller2]

dd if=\\.\d: of=c:\dumpfile.img bs=1k

If d is your atari drive...

 

Of course, windows sometimes throws up if you try to read past the end of a physical device. And windows has that goofy \\ syntax for drives....

 

HDClone does look nice though...

[ijor]

Well, the case is closed, at least for me. After working for an hour or so trying to get all the "dd" command line switches and parameters correct, I threw in the towel.

 

Hi Larry,

 

Sorry to hear the free solutions didn't work for you. I understand now is too late, you already bought a commertial software, but there are other similar free utilities which are GUI and not command line based.

 

But of course, any hard disk cloning/imaging commertial software should work great.

 

dd if=\\.\d: of=c:\dumpfile.img bs=1k

 

This might work, or it might not. It depends on how the CF is partitioned and which file system it has. I'm not familiar with Atari HDs to be specific, but unless it has a Windows compatible partition and file system, then this probably won't work on modern Windows.

 

You probably need something like this instead: \\.\PhysicalDriveX

 

The idea is to access the physical disk, and not a specific volume.

[+kheller2]

Right you are. I had forgotten about the PhysicalDrive names which is what you must use in this case.

[+Larry]

Well, the case is closed, at least for me. After working for an hour or so trying to get all the "dd" command line switches and parameters correct, I threw in the towel.

 

Hi Larry,

 

Sorry to hear the free solutions didn't work for you. I understand now is too late, you already bought a commertial software, but there are other similar free utilities which are GUI and not command line based.

 

But of course, any hard disk cloning/imaging commertial software should work great.

 

 

Hi Ijor-

Thanks just the same. But considering that there may be other folks who would like to be able to make quick, easy backups of their flash cards, can you name one or two such GUI backups that don't require a FAT (type) partition on the card? I searched long and hard in Windows and found nothing except HDClone. The closest thing I've found are "Photo Rescue" tools which will READ a non-standard flash card format, but invariably will not WRITE out anything except actual picture files to a Win Drive.

-Larry

[+Larry]

Update...

 

I just got off-line with Symantec tech support. According to them, it is not possible to use GHOST to access a compact flash card. I have a version of Ghost 9.0, but could not figure out how to use it for anything more than a Win drive backup/restore.

-Larry

[ijor]

I just got off-line with Symantec tech support. According to them, it is not possible to use GHOST to access a compact flash card.

 

Oh, I see. I expected Ghost would handle virtually any mass storage device, but I guess I was wrong. There are other similar commertial software like Drive Image.

 

In the worst case, Windows based software should work. There is WinImage, it is shareware I believe, with some free functionality. Then there is Pera's tool. The latter was designed for ST hard disks. So the file system operations won't work. But I understand it can image a whole drive blindly, so it should work and it is free.

 

Actually, it is almost trivial to make a Windows program to image a whole drive. It is then possible that there are other ones.

[+Larry]

I just got off-line with Symantec tech support. According to them, it is not possible to use GHOST to access a compact flash card.

 

Oh, I see. I expected Ghost would handle virtually any mass storage device, but I guess I was wrong. There are other similar commertial software like Drive Image.

 

In the worst case, Windows based software should work. There is WinImage, it is shareware I believe, with some free functionality. Then there is Pera's tool. The latter was designed for ST hard disks. So the file system operations won't work. But I understand it can image a whole drive blindly, so it should work and it is free.

 

Actually, it is almost trivial to make a Windows program to image a whole drive. It is then possible that there are other ones.

 

Thanks for the added info. Win Image looks like it might do the job. I will play with it a bit.

 

"Drive Image" by PowerQuest was bought by Symantec and became Ghost 9.0 or 10.0 (with some additional changes likely). I have Drive Image 7.X which was the last version released prior to the sale to Symantec -- it won't do it. The twin issues seem to be accessing USB mass storage devices and lack of a "standard" Microsoft file system on the drive. When I have checked out the "big names" in disk imaging through their tech support, these always come up along with a "no, ours won't do that."

 

I actually got what sounded like a pretty good explanation of the USB issue from one developer, although it's been a year or so, and I don't remember much about what he said. I do remember it had something to do with how Windows recognizes storage devices.

 

-Larry

[JR>]

Thanks for the added info. Win Image looks like it might do the job. I will play with it a bit.

 

"Drive Image" by PowerQuest was bought by Symantec and became Ghost 9.0 or 10.0 (with some additional changes likely). I have Drive Image 7.X which was the last version released prior to the sale to Symantec -- it won't do it. The twin issues seem to be accessing USB mass storage devices and lack of a "standard" Microsoft file system on the drive. When I have checked out the "big names" in disk imaging through their tech support, these always come up along with a "no, ours won't do that."

 

I actually got what sounded like a pretty good explanation of the USB issue from one developer, although it's been a year or so, and I don't remember much about what he said. I do remember it had something to do with how Windows recognizes storage devices.

 

-Larry

 

You might try these products with the CF/IDE adapter plugged directly into the IDE bus of your PC instead of using a USB card reader. Then the device should appear as an IDE drive instead of a USB Mass Storage Device.

[+Larry]

Thanks for the added info. Win Image looks like it might do the job. I will play with it a bit.

 

"Drive Image" by PowerQuest was bought by Symantec and became Ghost 9.0 or 10.0 (with some additional changes likely). I have Drive Image 7.X which was the last version released prior to the sale to Symantec -- it won't do it. The twin issues seem to be accessing USB mass storage devices and lack of a "standard" Microsoft file system on the drive. When I have checked out the "big names" in disk imaging through their tech support, these always come up along with a "no, ours won't do that."

 

I actually got what sounded like a pretty good explanation of the USB issue from one developer, although it's been a year or so, and I don't remember much about what he said. I do remember it had something to do with how Windows recognizes storage devices.

 

-Larry

 

You might try these products with the CF/IDE adapter plugged directly into the IDE bus of your PC instead of using a USB card reader. Then the device should appear as an IDE drive instead of a USB Mass Storage Device.

 

Hi JR-

Yes, that's true. And some might possibly work, although one still runs into "catch 23" -- no MS file system.

 

But back to my original question -- has anyone (besides me) actually done this? If so how?

 

I'd love to see a less expensive solution for other folks; however, right now my HDClone backup solution looks pretty good. I should add that if one is willing to copy the whole device, then the less-expensive "standard edition" of HDClone should work. See the list of features at:

http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

 

-Larry