8 ms·

One piece of advice I would offer to people using really old x86 hardware for lab or other purposes, which has hard-to-replace software on it. Find a way to use

One piece of advice I would offer to people using really old x86 hardware for lab or other purposes, which has hard-to-replace software on it. Find a way to use clonezilla to take an image of the whole (fat16?! fat32?) filesystem, and also of the disk as a whole including partitions. Store it somewhere safe in .tar.xz format. Additionally take images of whatever original install media you can find. I'm talking about stuff like where you find a system running a CNC milling machine from 1992 with a 60MB IDE hard drive in it. You might need to pull the hard drive and connect it to a somewhat newer system in order to boot from clonezilla and take the image. Something from the early 2000s with an ATA/33 controller on it should be backwards compatible to almost all of the oldest IDE hard drives. Can be quicker and easier than trying to run clonezilla on the native hardware (or on systems which have no idea of how to boot from a CD-ROM or USB). If you have something a lot older than that, it can get more complicated. Never personally needed to take a disk image of something with a MFM/RLL ISA HDD controller card driving an old 5.25" 10MB/20MB type drive, but it's probably possible. I bet you could get the controller card working in a 1999 vintage Pentium 3 in the ISA slot with enough hackery.

phendrenad2 5y ago
Yeah definitely. I swear, those old hard drives have a way of KNOWING when you're about to back them up and failing, just to spite you.
- eric__cartman 5y ago
  That's because you need to sneak behind them with a Hiren's Boot CD before the hard drive has time to kill itself.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Use Linux and ddrescue, gddrescue or similar instead of that crap.
- geocrasher 5y ago
  I once had a hard drive fail this way. It was a 60GB SATA disk from around 2006. I powered down the machine to drop in a couple of new disks and gave the machine a much needed dusting. When it restarted it had the click of death. The freezer trick worked long enough for me to grab the few kb of data I really needed from that disk. I wrote about it here: https://miscdotgeek.com/adventures-in-hard-drives/ https://miscdotgeek.com/adventures-in-hard-drives/
- bserge 5y ago
  Most likely because the heads try to read a few back blocks that weren't accessed for years. You can do block checks regularly, which takes a looong time on high capacity drives (or is impossible on newer ones due to firmware restrictions).
- dosman33 5y ago
  If you are powering off a very old system that spends most of its life powered on, don't let the hard drives or power supply cool down. Do your best to keep your work as brief as possible and get the thing turned back on before it assumes room temperature. These components tend to run the hottest, you can have cold solder joints contract and stop making contact when they cool down. Also check any socketed chips and make sure they are fully seated. Chip creep happens when frequently thermal-cycled boards cause the IC's to slowly lift themselves out of their own sockets.
j45 5y ago
Ghost and VMware converter are good tools for this as well
- walrus01 5y ago
  As I recall the origin of Clonezilla was as a GPL/open source licensed community built alternative to Ghost, but to fulfill exactly the same functionality.
  - j45 5y ago
    Clonezilla is good too. So is PING.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
If recovery is critical, use lzip and not xz. The compression ratio is the same but xz archives are particularly vulnerable to corruption.
- mangamadaiyan 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, what in the file format makes it particularly vulnerable to corruption?
  - mangamadaiyan 5y ago
    A little googling threw up this link: https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html I haven't read through the link properly, so I'm as yet unable to comment on the merits of xz or the lack thereof; posting it here for other readers who might be curious, as I was.
    - walrus01 5y ago
      I can't say that I've ever seen a corrupt xz file that wasn't in a place where a bzip2 or lzip or anything else wouldn't have also been hosed (a very thoroughly failed ext4fs file system on a dying hard drive).
      - bombcar 5y ago
        It could be a situation where it's "how bad are you hosed" - for example a bit flipping in a text document can pretty easily be fixed by hand (though it could be completely missed, and critical to be sure) - but a compressed format could either recover losing a "sector" or so, or simply be impossible to restore anything from it. There's an argument that you're better off knowing you lost data than having most but with a hidden flaw - but either way you want multiple copies and preferably in a format that contains error detection AND correction - and itself is stored on a filesystem that provides similar (ZFS for example).
- adrianN 5y ago
cookiengineer 5y ago
This is literally the reason why I keep my ancient panasonic CF and 1st gen latitudes and thinkpads around. The laptops have the huge advantage that they have a serial port, which allows to rescue pretty much everything given that you implement an adapter software for it. I wish modern hacker laptops had an easy non-proprietary way to get a serial port. The only alternative we have is using an Arduino based solution...but that's like a downgrade compared to 20 years ago.
- midasuni 5y ago
  USB serial adapters will give you a standard usb port at /dev/ttyUSBn, usable via minicom etc.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    USB to serial/paralel adapters are good enough for most hobby projects but aren't suitable for professional or latency critical applications like industrial, audio, arcade retro-emulation and CNC machines. There's too many variables in the way, like the USB to X chip used in that converter plus the driver for it and how the OS scheduler handles the USB stack and API calls, all this causing major jitter in the communication timing. In uni we still had air-gapped Win2K/98 computers for the robotics labs since in the days prior to Windows XP, your app could write directly to the serial/paralel ports, so you could have your program use 100% CPU load, jitter-free, to poll the serial/paralel port, that's why they were used in CNC. For example your Win/DOS program would directly drive the cutting head in real-time through the paralel port. You can say goodbye to that via USB converters unless you want your expensive machine mangle its cutting head. My embedded systems prof from uni would only buy Fujitsu (Siemens) laptops as they were the only ones who still sold models with serial and parallel ports on modern hardware even as late as 2017(!), so if you're a professional or serious hobbyist in this space I suggest you grab one of those before they become scarce and overpriced like how high-end CRTs have now become. There are companies in Taiwan/China making custom X86 barebones/motherboards using modern hardware and old ports but they're low volume and destined for the industrial market so they have eye-watering prices.
zrm 5y ago
> You might need to pull the hard drive and connect it to a somewhat newer system in order to boot from clonezilla and take the image. Something from the early 2000s with an ATA/33 controller on it should be backwards compatible to almost all of the oldest IDE hard drives. Can be quicker and easier than trying to run clonezilla on the native hardware (or on systems which have no idea of how to boot from a CD-ROM or USB). Also note that Parallel ATA host bus adapters exist and then you don't even need an old PC, just a ~$20 adapter for a modern one.
- walrus01 5y ago
  although some modern PC BIOSes have problems with manually entering the heads/cylinders as you might find on the label of an IDE hard drive from 1992. additionally I have found that modern udma/133 parallel ata drive controllers have less than perfect compatibility with some very old IDE stuff. while a 'vintage' motherboard like something with an intel 440fx or 440bx chipset from the very late 1990s should work.
  - dfox 5y ago
    All IDE drives are linear block devices and the CHS numbers set in BIOS are only necessary to make the BIOS happy. The types and CHS numbers were relevant for MFM/RLL harddrives without integrated controller. The IDE interface is essentially an simplified ISA bus on a cable and all of what should be called controller resides on the harddrive, in fact that is what both IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) and ATA (AT Attachment, as in "AT bus" = "16-bit ISA") acronyms alude to. If you only intend to access the drive from Linux (ie. clonezilla) you can simply ignore the BIOS settings as Linux kernel will detect the drive correctly even when it is not configured in BIOS at all.
pmlnr 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddrescue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddrescue can come in handy if the situation is bad.
grishka 5y ago
> If you have something a lot older than that, it can get more complicated. Could probably dump it out through the serial port.
nix23 5y ago
>.tar.xz No, use tar.lz http://lzip.nongnu.org/ http://lzip.nongnu.org/ http://lzip.nongnu.org/safety_of_the_lzip_format.html http://lzip.nongnu.org/safety_of_the_lzip_format.html http://lzip.nongnu.org/xz_inadequate.html http://lzip.nongnu.org/xz_inadequate.html
vmchale 5y ago
> Store it somewhere safe in .tar.xz format. Or lzip! Has better recoverability properties: lzip.org
jlgaddis 5y ago
> Find a way to use clonezilla to take an image of the whole (fat16?! fat32?) filesystem, and also of the disk as a whole including partitions. And perhaps invest in a few CompactFlash <-> IDE adapters, too.
LocalH 5y ago
Do be careful about powering off HDDs that have been possibly spinning for 20+ years. They might not spin back up.
- walrus01 5y ago
  Yes absolutely. If it's running and you can get access to I/O on it to copy data off via serial or something (let's say it's running MS-DOS 3.3, 5.0 or 6.2), use something like laplink to transfer as much off as possible before taking it down for intrusive maintenance. https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=laplink+ms-dos https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=lap...

phendrenad2 5y ago

Yeah definitely. I swear, those old hard drives have a way of KNOWING when you're about to back them up and failing, just to spite you.

eric__cartman 5y ago
That's because you need to sneak behind them with a Hiren's Boot CD before the hard drive has time to kill itself.
- anthk 5y ago
  Use Linux and ddrescue, gddrescue or similar instead of that crap.
geocrasher 5y ago
I once had a hard drive fail this way. It was a 60GB SATA disk from around 2006. I powered down the machine to drop in a couple of new disks and gave the machine a much needed dusting. When it restarted it had the click of death. The freezer trick worked long enough for me to grab the few kb of data I really needed from that disk. I wrote about it here: https://miscdotgeek.com/adventures-in-hard-drives/ https://miscdotgeek.com/adventures-in-hard-drives/
bserge 5y ago
Most likely because the heads try to read a few back blocks that weren't accessed for years. You can do block checks regularly, which takes a looong time on high capacity drives (or is impossible on newer ones due to firmware restrictions).
dosman33 5y ago
If you are powering off a very old system that spends most of its life powered on, don't let the hard drives or power supply cool down. Do your best to keep your work as brief as possible and get the thing turned back on before it assumes room temperature. These components tend to run the hottest, you can have cold solder joints contract and stop making contact when they cool down. Also check any socketed chips and make sure they are fully seated. Chip creep happens when frequently thermal-cycled boards cause the IC's to slowly lift themselves out of their own sockets.

j45 5y ago

Ghost and VMware converter are good tools for this as well

walrus01 5y ago
As I recall the origin of Clonezilla was as a GPL/open source licensed community built alternative to Ghost, but to fulfill exactly the same functionality.
- j45 5y ago
  Clonezilla is good too. So is PING.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

If recovery is critical, use lzip and not xz. The compression ratio is the same but xz archives are particularly vulnerable to corruption.

mangamadaiyan 5y ago
Out of curiosity, what in the file format makes it particularly vulnerable to corruption?
- mangamadaiyan 5y ago
  A little googling threw up this link: https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html I haven't read through the link properly, so I'm as yet unable to comment on the merits of xz or the lack thereof; posting it here for other readers who might be curious, as I was.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    I can't say that I've ever seen a corrupt xz file that wasn't in a place where a bzip2 or lzip or anything else wouldn't have also been hosed (a very thoroughly failed ext4fs file system on a dying hard drive).
    - bombcar 5y ago
      It could be a situation where it's "how bad are you hosed" - for example a bit flipping in a text document can pretty easily be fixed by hand (though it could be completely missed, and critical to be sure) - but a compressed format could either recover losing a "sector" or so, or simply be impossible to restore anything from it. There's an argument that you're better off knowing you lost data than having most but with a hidden flaw - but either way you want multiple copies and preferably in a format that contains error detection AND correction - and itself is stored on a filesystem that provides similar (ZFS for example).
adrianN 5y ago

cookiengineer 5y ago

This is literally the reason why I keep my ancient panasonic CF and 1st gen latitudes and thinkpads around. The laptops have the huge advantage that they have a serial port, which allows to rescue pretty much everything given that you implement an adapter software for it. I wish modern hacker laptops had an easy non-proprietary way to get a serial port. The only alternative we have is using an Arduino based solution...but that's like a downgrade compared to 20 years ago.

midasuni 5y ago
USB serial adapters will give you a standard usb port at /dev/ttyUSBn, usable via minicom etc.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  USB to serial/paralel adapters are good enough for most hobby projects but aren't suitable for professional or latency critical applications like industrial, audio, arcade retro-emulation and CNC machines. There's too many variables in the way, like the USB to X chip used in that converter plus the driver for it and how the OS scheduler handles the USB stack and API calls, all this causing major jitter in the communication timing. In uni we still had air-gapped Win2K/98 computers for the robotics labs since in the days prior to Windows XP, your app could write directly to the serial/paralel ports, so you could have your program use 100% CPU load, jitter-free, to poll the serial/paralel port, that's why they were used in CNC. For example your Win/DOS program would directly drive the cutting head in real-time through the paralel port. You can say goodbye to that via USB converters unless you want your expensive machine mangle its cutting head. My embedded systems prof from uni would only buy Fujitsu (Siemens) laptops as they were the only ones who still sold models with serial and parallel ports on modern hardware even as late as 2017(!), so if you're a professional or serious hobbyist in this space I suggest you grab one of those before they become scarce and overpriced like how high-end CRTs have now become. There are companies in Taiwan/China making custom X86 barebones/motherboards using modern hardware and old ports but they're low volume and destined for the industrial market so they have eye-watering prices.

zrm 5y ago

> You might need to pull the hard drive and connect it to a somewhat newer system in order to boot from clonezilla and take the image. Something from the early 2000s with an ATA/33 controller on it should be backwards compatible to almost all of the oldest IDE hard drives. Can be quicker and easier than trying to run clonezilla on the native hardware (or on systems which have no idea of how to boot from a CD-ROM or USB). Also note that Parallel ATA host bus adapters exist and then you don't even need an old PC, just a ~$20 adapter for a modern one.

walrus01 5y ago
although some modern PC BIOSes have problems with manually entering the heads/cylinders as you might find on the label of an IDE hard drive from 1992. additionally I have found that modern udma/133 parallel ata drive controllers have less than perfect compatibility with some very old IDE stuff. while a 'vintage' motherboard like something with an intel 440fx or 440bx chipset from the very late 1990s should work.
- dfox 5y ago
  All IDE drives are linear block devices and the CHS numbers set in BIOS are only necessary to make the BIOS happy. The types and CHS numbers were relevant for MFM/RLL harddrives without integrated controller. The IDE interface is essentially an simplified ISA bus on a cable and all of what should be called controller resides on the harddrive, in fact that is what both IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) and ATA (AT Attachment, as in "AT bus" = "16-bit ISA") acronyms alude to. If you only intend to access the drive from Linux (ie. clonezilla) you can simply ignore the BIOS settings as Linux kernel will detect the drive correctly even when it is not configured in BIOS at all.

pmlnr 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddrescue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddrescue can come in handy if the situation is bad.

grishka 5y ago

> If you have something a lot older than that, it can get more complicated. Could probably dump it out through the serial port.

nix23 5y ago

>.tar.xz No, use tar.lz http://lzip.nongnu.org/ http://lzip.nongnu.org/ http://lzip.nongnu.org/safety_of_the_lzip_format.html http://lzip.nongnu.org/safety_of_the_lzip_format.html http://lzip.nongnu.org/xz_inadequate.html http://lzip.nongnu.org/xz_inadequate.html

vmchale 5y ago

> Store it somewhere safe in .tar.xz format. Or lzip! Has better recoverability properties: lzip.org

jlgaddis 5y ago

> Find a way to use clonezilla to take an image of the whole (fat16?! fat32?) filesystem, and also of the disk as a whole including partitions. And perhaps invest in a few CompactFlash <-> IDE adapters, too.

LocalH 5y ago

Do be careful about powering off HDDs that have been possibly spinning for 20+ years. They might not spin back up.

walrus01 5y ago
Yes absolutely. If it's running and you can get access to I/O on it to copy data off via serial or something (let's say it's running MS-DOS 3.3, 5.0 or 6.2), use something like laplink to transfer as much off as possible before taking it down for intrusive maintenance. https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=laplink+ms-dos https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=lap...