Hard Drive Gurus,

I hope that this is a good place for this question If not please excuse the intrusion and kindly direct me to a more appropriate place.

I have a need to make an identical copy (sector by sector) of a hard drive that is embedded in a piece of equipment. This way the drive can be restored if the original ever crashes. The drive is a Western Digital WD400UE. As far as I can tell it is a standard 2.5" EIDE drive that should plug directly into a PC.

The tricky part is that it contains an unknown file system, at least unknown to Windows. Hence, I need some sort of utility software that is operating system (and maybe BIOS) agnostic. The hardware that I have to work with (so far) is a standard PC with both primary and secondary HDD controllers. I also have an Apricorn Drive Wire interface that will allow a hard drive to be connected to a USB port if this helps. Of course, I also have a duplicate WD400UE hard drive.

I have looked at MHDD utility and it seems to offer some of the needed functions with its sector read and write to/from file. However I don't understand how this can work. If you have a Windows 2K box and basically boot to DOS with MHDD. Now DOS doesn't understand the NTFS file system on the main HDD even if the primary controller was enabled. So where do you copy the image (sector) file to so that it can be restored to the new (clone) drive? I don't know if DOS could even handle a 40GB file.

So, have I overlooked something or does anyone else have any suggestions for how to accomplish this task or perhaps a different utility that is more attuned to doing this kind of cloning?


Thanks,

Steve

Hi Steve,

welcome....

sectors have no idea who or what OS is stamping their
magnetic inclination ....

try CopyR for sector by sector copy - it's free.

You can also try "Ranesh Partition Manager". This is my program of choice for copying hard drives entirely or just specific partitions of a hard drive. The downside to Ranesh, is that it will only copy working hard drives, it will stop and report an error if there is a physical problem.

For copying with problems, I am a stickler for the old and reliable software. I will either use *nix and a dd command, or boot up 'dolly'.

_________________
I may not be the fastest, but I'll get there in the end.

HDD Gurus,

I thought that I would provide an update on the progress of this project. Using your suggestions we tried both Linux and CopyR. Our chosen box for copying is a generic Intel based E-machine.

We first tried the DD approach with Linux. The main HDDs were disconnected from the primary channel and the source and destination drives were connected in their places with the source as master. Ubuntu Linux was booted from the CD ROM on the secondary Channel. Linux could "see" the blank destination drive but could not "see" the source drive at all. The DD command failed immediately.

Next we tried CopyR booted from diskette. The drives were still connected as before on the primary channel. CopyR was able to correctly identify both drives (read out the SN) and was even able to spin up and down the source drive. This gave us an indication that the drive was still alive and not completely dead. However, when told to copy the program generated errors (which I don't remember exactly) and failed.

In the process of doing this we located a FAE contact from WD at a local company and asked them to duplicate the drive. Surprisingly they couldn't clone the drive either! I don't know what tools they used but am assuming their own factory provided toolset.

After all of this the drive was reinstalled in the equipment that it was removed from and it proceeded to work properly! This proved that the drive was not damaged in the process of trying to copy it.

So the mystery remains. What is "special" about this drive which looks like any other notebook drive that normal tools cannot access it? For reference the model and serial number as printed on the drive and confirmed by CopyR is as follows:

Model = WD400UE-22KVT0
Serial = WXC706147375

Can any of you provide any insight as to what is going on with this drive? Possibly special firmware? Special locking sequence to prevent unauthorized access?


Thanks,

Steve

Sorry if this is obvious, but two things come to mind..

1) The drive is locked. Usually seen in laptops, if you set a BIOS Password, it also sets the password on the HD. In this case, the drive would work fine in the original machine, but not in another machine, without being unlocked.

2) Did you set the Master/Slave jumper correctly. Most name brand machines use Cable Select cables, and set all drives to CS. Put the drive in another machine without a CS cable, and you need to set the jumpers for it to work properly.

The source drive (the one in question) was jumpered as in the original machine (CS I believe). The fact that CopyR could at least control the motor and read the drive ID seems to indicate that this was not the problem.

If you don't use a CS cable in the machine you're using to test/recover, You'll need to change the jumper to Master or Slave. I've seen drives somewhat-recognized, even though the jumper is wrong.

As for being locked, MHDD should tell you.