Hi all
I've got a drive in a real state of disrepair that I wanted to have a shot at using MHDD on. The problem is, the only hardware I have is laptops. I figured the Magic boot disk would hold the answer, since I've got an external USB drive that I am planning on using as the destination after using the ATOF command, as I've done successfully in the past.

When config.sys processes, USBASPI.SYS detects my drive at ID:0 LUN:0 and shows the correct model etc, but that's as good as it gets. Once I'm booted into DOS, i can't see the drive with fdisk to create a partition on it. Even if I create a FAT partition on it using a different machine (I made one that was limited to 10GB just in case) I still can't see the partition with fdisk under the magic boot disk. I tried using a USB pen drive, and that gets me further, to the point where I can at least select that particular drive within fdisk, but when I attempt to create a partition on it I get a message about insufficient space to create partition when it's on the 'verifying drive integrity' step.

When I've used MHDD in the past I've had the luxury of having ready access to an old school machine with 2 IDE channels, so it was simply a matter of plugging the drives in. This time around I don't have that option. One thing I've even toyed with is setting up a VM that runs samba, creating a share, and adding TCP/IP drivers to the Magic Boot Disk so I can map the smb share and dump the output there, but it does seem I'm tantalisingly close to getting USB mass storage working so would rather pursue that avenue first.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be most grateful.

Thanks
Richard

If I was in that situation, then until you know that only MHDD (from the standard range of free tools) recognises the disk, then I wouldn't start there. Instead I'd use Linux/Unix, see whether the raw device is recognised (not whether the filesystem(s) on the drive is/are recognised), and if so, try GNU ddrescue for cloning the "problem" disk onto your USB disk. Of course this needs Linux and ddrescue skills. It's not a "one click" approach, but it avoids certain problems with trying to use MHDD for cloning, including the one you have at the moment, since you're likely to find USB support for your laptop in Linux/Unix distros.


Based on this description, and your test results, my hypothesis is that the DOS USB driver is not quite compatible with your laptop's USB chipset. If I was forced to be using a laptop, then I remember finding at least one other free DOS USB driver that could be tried, when I last looked into this a while ago. You'll need to Google / Bing for it.

So there are 2 areas which you can consider investigating, if you're stuck with a laptop. Of course all the usual DIY warnings apply.

I got it going.

For me the first step I always take in any data recovery workflow is to try a Linux boot disk. That was giving pages of errors about the volume (DriveNotReady SeekCompleteError type thing). That was to me a pretty sure sign that dd was going to struggle. I've been in an almost identical situation a couple of years ago and Linux was sadly no use then either.

The problem turned out to be that the Magic boot disk is missing the Motto Hairu di1000dd.sys file in the floppy image. My Pen drive doesn't seem to have a compatible partition table, but my USB HDD worked a treat once I added Motto Hairu into the 1440k img file embedded in the ISO and loaded it from config.sys

Let the mhdd recovery begin.

Congratulations.


That's common when using some Linux Live CDs, which aren't optimised for this type of situation.


Not in my experience (and in any case I didn't suggest using dd). Instead it's a pretty sure sign of using an unoptimised Live CD, if you get "pages" of such errors on boot. Anyway, you're past this point now.


Having used MHDD ATOF myself, its limitations (especially if you want to try filesystem recovery afterwards, and not just file carving, when the source disk has some unreadable sectors) can affect the end result. But if that's what you're happy with, then good luck