I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital audio multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland Service) is that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format correctly.
It goes through the format process of making 4 10GB partitions but always fails at the end of it. If you put the failed drive into a PC you can see 4 FAT 32 10G drive icons, so the machine is seeing and writing to the drive. If you turn on the "physical format" option, the formatting takes about 8 hours, and again fails right at the end. I've tried all jumper combinations re: Master/slave etc.
I have an old 80G Maxtor drive that the 2480 WILL format, though it is old and very noisy. The drive I have bought is a Western Digital 160Gb PATA drive. (WD1600AAJB)
So is there perhaps a way to fool the 2480 into thinking this is an 80G drive?
I actually had a similar problem with my Sony Vaio laptop when I tried to upgrade the 40G drive - the Vaio didn't recognise the large drive properly and DMA (I think) was not turned on, resulting in extremely slow disk access. After posting on usenet someone pointed me to an alternative chipset driver that made the Vaio think it had a SCSI/Raid controller and the large IDE hard drive then worked perfectly!?!
What is this thing with too large hard drives? Is there any likelyhood of getting this drive to format?
Have you tried putting the drive into a PC and building/formatting your four 10G partitions *there*? IIRC, FAT32 will support up to ~30G so you could try four 30G partitions and losing the remaining
40G on the drive (which should still be better than the original device *ever* had!).
Larger disks use LBA addressing and can convert the old C/H/S addresses to this form -- but, only to the extent supported by the CHS scheme! (thank the morons who saved a few *bits* on these disks (going back to floppy land) with FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, etc. (gee, aren't disks BIGGER than "a few bits"??) and gave us all of these compatibility issues...
I just used a CF adapter and a 40G CF card to repair an old system that we have to use with some ancient test equipment. Not only does it work, it runs FAST. They are cheap to boot.
LBA is a particularly simple linear addressing scheme; blocks are located by an integer index, with the first block being LBA 0, the second LBA 1, and so on.
IDE standard included 22-bit LBA as an option, which was further extended to 28-bit with the release of ATA-1 (1994) and to 48-bit with the release of ATA-6 (2003). Most hard drives released after 1996 implement Logical block addressing.
Only *some* smaller disks. Older (the OP was talking about "old systems" -- I guess I take that *literally*) drives expected the CHS values to conform to the *physical* geometry of the drive (i.e., before ZDR, etc.). Older INT13 limits trapped you at ~500MB (I have a selection of ~300MB drives on hand for just such machines).
Early IDE implementations required the INIT message to provide the *actual* physical geometry implementation to the drive's controller. Getting this wrong resulted in a scrambled disk. (I was "lucky"? enough to be a victim of one of the first IDE machines ~1986 vintage when the rest of the world was still ST506).
As processing power IN THE DRIVE became affordable, it was possible for the drive to map arbitrary "virtual" geometries into their own physical geometry. This allowed you to use any "drive type" that your BIOS would support -- so long as you never exceeded the physical capacity of the device. I've modified the ROMs in my Compaq Portable III and Portable 386 to create bogus drive types to allow 300M drives to be used in these boxes (this is tricky as you have to do so without invalidating the ROMs checksum, etc.) instead of the ~100MB limit imposed by the original drive type selection.
"Type 47" eventually became synonymous with "user defined geometry" as BIOS's began to allow these extra parameters to be stored in "CMOS" (once the 50 byte limitation of the original MC146818 was ignored). This allowed you to fabricate an arbitrary geometry for your drive without concern for the "claimed" physical geometry (since ZDR has made this meaningless) as long as your geometry fit "within" the drive's capacity.
Nowadays, the drive's capacity is queried (won't work with antique drives!) and automagically accommodated.
Of course, that's at the lowest level in the drive interface "stack". You still have to deal with partitions, slices and the individual requirements of the file systems hosted *on* that drive -- any of which can also constrain the usable space.
Many OS's still have throwbacks to physical device geometries for hysterical raisins. E.g., you can't boot a Solaris systems (pre 10?) if the startup code isn't within the first 2G of the boot partition; the same is true of many MS OS's (DOS 3.3, IIRC, had a 32M! limit).
Any of these things can be responsible for upsetting the OP's device. I stand by my initial comment: format the drive on a PC and then install it in the device. If you are tech savvy,
*wipe* the drive first; then let the device *try* to format it; then examine the MBR and partition table to see if everything is *almost* right (it could be that the "problem" lies in writing the partition table sanely); then, resort to the PC approach
(I've used this sort of tactic to upsize drives in NAS boxes, etc. beyond "factory supported limits")
In this case there is no OS on the disk at all, the 2480 does not boot from it. I have successfully upgraded the 2480's OS via MIDI onto its onboard Flash, with no valid hard drive installed. The drive is purely storage.
Does this make things any easier? Is cloning the new drive from the working (noisy) one a viable proposition?
It is viable. Would need to be done in a PC, bit for Bit copy. But I'm not sure if you need to clone it without me knowing the file system. I snuck in here late, just what is the equipment. I've spent a couple decades with digital recorders from Fostex, Otari and DVR recorders from SA, Samsung and Cisco. The firmware embedded OS isn't a problem but I'd like to do a little research on what a 2840 is.
On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 10:03:10 -0700, D Yuniskis put finger to keyboard and composed:
FAT32 can support drives much larger than that. For example, I'm running a 120GB drive on a Win98SE box with a FAT32 file system. You may be thinking of Windows XP's artificial 32GB limit.
- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.
Sure, but the code running in the device still has some concept of what *it* thinks a disk will "look like". Whatever the prevailing psychosis regarding disks happened to be at the time the device was manufactured... :>
You still have the "what do I think a 'disk' looks like" issue.
If it is just used for storage, do you have to *put* anything on it, initially? I.e., can the device cope with a "blank" (though formatted!) disk?
If this is the case, format it as I described (in a PC).
OTOH, if you need to "initialize" it's contents, then you will want to clone an image off of a "preciously initialized" disk...
Yes. "Clonezilla" (et al.) is your friend... You will still need to do this in a PC -- though you can do it on a PC with the covers off and your disk(s) (the one being cloned and then the one you are cloning *to*) dangling from their cables (I have a small PC that I use for this -- set the drive on top of the CD-ROM (on top of a pad of paper acting as an insulator) and "borrow" the cable from the existing disk drive in the PC)
BTW, it probably wouldn't hurt to save a copy of the disk images that Clonezilla builds for you onto CD or DVD (depending on how large they actually are) so you have them as a fallback *when* your disk dies...
I may have made a mistake on that, it might be FAT 16. ? I'm not able to verify that right now.
Anyway it is some kind of FAT system that my WinXP desktop recognises.
Having said that, I have looked at forums regarding drives for this unit and it does seem you need at least a 10mSec access drive for reliability. It needs to read and write up to 24 tracks of audio. Would Roland have tried to supercharge (rather than reinvent) the wheel here, or would they take off the shelf IDE drives and use bog standard library software to write and read to it?
My new WD drive average is specified below this figure, though its absolute max seek time is a quoted 20mSec. I wasn't able to clearly establish what this forum quoted minimum 10mSecs actually means - average or absolute maximum.
Have you contacted Roland support? That would be the first thing I would do. Obviously there is content on the noisy hard drive you wish to transfer and I am certain this is not a unique situation that Roland/Boss would have support for.
I am in regular contact with the Roland Service Dept. UK. They do not have a specific solution, though are very helpful. This is, after all, an obsolete piece of equipment, designed for a 40Gb hard drive, that worked very well. Shame you can't buy the drives any more.
It would be rather neat, though, to find a working solution!
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