None-too-well Caviar Drive in a Beige G3

[ArmorAlley]

Hi all,

I drove home last week with a newly acquired Beige G3. It had been used to drive a Linotype-Hell Topaz. For anyone who has never seen one, it is 50kg of scanner. It has *wheels*. It needs its own room. Anyway, I wanted to get the necessary software and drivers backed up before I went any further, as it seems that these are the only copies that survive. It seems that the 1½ hour car-journey home was too much for the 19-year-old G3.

The machine booted up to disk with the question mark. Not good. I took the drive out, put it into my MDD and had a look at it. It is an Apple-branded 6GB Caviar drive (IDE). I looked at under SW 9.2.2. I should probably try 10.2 or 10.3. Norton Utilities 6 sees the drive and volume but hangs during examination. SilverLining Pro 6.4.8 sees it but can't mount it. HDT Tools 4 don't even see it.

Beh.

Can any of ye recommend some software that will allow me to make a bit-for-bit image of the drive so that I can at least try and format the drive, while not losing what was on it? Bearing in mind that I can't mount the drive, I'm not expecting image-making software like DiskCopy 6 to be of much use.

Do ye have any other suggestions based on experience?

Thanks very much,

aa

 

[Themk]

In Mac OS X, you could try to use dd to make a bit level copy of the drive. dd works really well for me.

 

[rsolberg]

I'd be inclined to pull the drive and connect it to another machine. Instead of dd, which will hang/fail if it hits errors, I'd run ddrescue following a tutorial. You'll need another disk with a bunch of free space. ddrescue will make an image, skipping and marking errors as it encounters them, then once it's finished the first pass, it'll try the bad blocks again, and continue attempting to recover missing data piece by piece using an algorithm to maximize recovery. When you stop it or it completes, you'll have a raw disk image you can mount or write to a new drive. I do not have experience with it in Mac OS X, but it's proven very useful on Linux.

 

[ArmorAlley]

Hi rsolberg, I will try this tonight. I got as far as man dd in the terminal last night. I'm new to it, so I need to find an intro to the command line in Mac OS.