[SunHELP] Changing hard drives SunOS 4.1.1 Sun4c

[Fredric QJ Blåholtz]

So, have this Sun Sparcstation 2, the frambuffer broke, bought a
replacement, the PSU broke, bought a replacement, the external drive
started acting up, took a backup copy with a clone tool on a PC, internal
drive started going wacky as well, had to turn it on it's side to make it
work... have swapped the NVRAM as well, hacked with an external battery.

So, soon there are no original parts left.

I used the EaseUs hard drive clone tool from a Ultimate Boot CD, got an old
2.25GB drive and successfully made a copy that it booted from. Got the
panic copy of the external drive with the same program, only option at the
time was an SD-card in a SCSI-card reader and pointing a fan to the
external hard drive (5.25" huge monster) at a pair of circuits going hot.

Disks in that size isn't very easy to come buy at reasonable price so when
a friend offered a 9GB hard drive with a 68 pin connector and a 50 pin
adapter I tried it out. Copying from the original giant sized drive didn't
want to work again so I ran the EaseUs program from the UBCD 5.1.1 with the
SD-card instead. Went fine, no errors.

After hooking it to the Sparcstation 2 it wasn't accepted, complained about
the header - seems it wasn't what it was supposed to be, found some tip
about replacing a missing header and checked the format command but got
stuck when it asked for cylinders etc, couldn't find any proper information
about that and I haven't dealt with it since I added hard drives to my
Amiga in the early 90's.

So I quit, took a look at the drive in WinHex with the drive hooked to a
SCSI-card in the PC. The header was emptied out, the previous "SUN1.3G cyl
1965 alt 2 hd 17 sec 80 etc etc" wasn't there any more, possibly the format
command erases that even before you have entered any information?

The 9GB drive seem to have been found but is there any idea to keep trying
with that, is it likely it will work?
How come the 2.25GB drive worked with a binary copy, the header (at least
was) "SUN1.05 cyl 2036 alt 2 hd 14 sec 72" and wasn't correct either. I
assumed it used the drive like it had that geometry and simply didn't care
about the rest of the hard drive.

I have filled the 9GB drive with $FF and will attempt to write the binary
data back again, hope it will make a difference.

I'm not interested in updating stuff, installing other OS or similar, want
to keep the same data, just swap to functional drives. I only keep this
computer around so I can access that one program I need old data from from
time to time.


I have the data that's going to be on the drive (I assume it's correct as
it was copied with no errors), just need a compatible drive or the correct
procedure to put it there.
Any sane advice about this would be most helpful, these hard drives don't
hold on forever.

/ Fredric the newcomer.
-- 
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* Fairchild Channel F collector extraordinaire *
http://channelf.se - The Gallery of Channel F