Question for old timer gurus only (ESDI anyone?)

  • Thread starter Thread starter unixzip
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unixzip

At work we have a very old HP Vectra (Pentium I) server (running a
critical app) that uses internal ESDI HDD.
We have to clone the internal drive and bought an exact replacement
drive.
When booting with Ghost floppy, both drives are seen but as soon as the
copy starts, we get disk read errors. Chkdsk and Ghost integrity check
all come back OK. Is there any special setting that Ghost needs. I'm
assuming that Ghost is not aware that the drives are ESDI since the
BIOS takes care of the INT13 presentation.
 
At work we have a very old HP Vectra (Pentium I) server (running a
critical app) that uses internal ESDI HDD.
We have to clone the internal drive and bought an exact replacement
drive.
When booting with Ghost floppy, both drives are seen but as soon as the
copy starts, we get disk read errors. Chkdsk and Ghost integrity check
all come back OK. Is there any special setting that Ghost needs. I'm
assuming that Ghost is not aware that the drives are ESDI since the
BIOS takes care of the INT13 presentation.
Click to expand...

It's been a long time but IIRC ESDI drives need to be low-level formatted
after installation--did you do that?
 
Previously J. Clarke said:
(e-mail address removed) wrote:
Click to expand...
It's been a long time but IIRC ESDI drives need to be low-level formatted
after installation--did you do that?
Click to expand...

Works by following the instrucions in the controller manual.

There is also the issue that ESDI disks will have bad sectors visible
to the OS and mapped out in the filesystem. That means that you need
to check whether the read errors are in the manufacturers known defect
list (usually printed somewhere on the disk). If they are, don't
worry, everything is working correct. Disks do have defects, and ESDI
did not hide them. If they are not, you have a problem with the source
disk or controller.

In both cases you cannot make a reliable sector-by-sector copy of an
ESDI disk, unless the _target_ disk is completely error free in the
area you use, since other wise you will write to defect sectors, that
still may keep the data for some hours/days/weeks if the defects are
just weak sectors. This is not reliable in any way though and you
should avoid it.

You can make a sector-by-sector copy of an ESDI disk to an IDE or even
a modern ATA disk, since they re-map defective sectors and behave
mostly the same on BIOS disk access. Whether this still boots depends
on the BIOS and OS. An ATA controller with BIOS might help. You may
also be able to clone the ESDI disk to an SCSI disk of same or larger
size, if you use an SCSI controller with its own BIOS that works with
the OS on the disk. To make such the copy you need a defect-tolerant
disk copy program. Don't know whether ghost is that. The one I use
is dd_rescue under Linux. Maybe you can boot Knoppix from CD, it
has dd_rescue on it.

Arno
 
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