Large IDE drives not compatable with old systems

How about Ebay or an 'overstuffed' computer store?

First possibility: look around for somebody who has a laptop with a 40-gigabyte 2.5" IDE drive in it. Laptop drives of this size were fairly common just a couple of years ago, and you may be able to find one which is still in reasonable working condition. You'd need a new mounting bracket of some sort (or just double-sided foam tape) and a small adapter to connect it to a 3.5" drive IDE cable, but it should work just fine, and its performance will probably be as good or better than the older 40-gig 3.5" drive that has failed. If you offered the owner of such a drive a fresh 160-gig 2.5" drive as an even exchange (that seems to be about the smallest you can buy off-the-shelf these days) you could probably arrange a deal.

Second possibility: buy an IDE-interface 2.5" solid-state drive... they're available in 32- and 64-gig capacity these days. Same physical arrangements as above... mounting arrangement and adapter cable.

Some 40 & 80 GB recertifed drives here:

Interestingly, I needed a 40GB HDD just last week to repair a Fostex multitracker. Like you, I was struggling to find one until a friend of mine who runs a computer repair shop, pointed me at a local computer recycler that he knew. He had 40GB drives "coming out of his ears" was his exact phrase, and was only too happy to let me relieve him of one for free. My computer repair mate said that he usually had them stacked up as well, left over from upgrades, and would have been able to help me had he not just had a big clear-out a few days before !

Any computer repair shops or recycling agencies in your area that you could try, Gareth ?

Arfa

You ought to be able to get small drives very cheaply. Figure out how msall you need, and if necessary but a whole computer for 10 dollars and take the drive out. But there are places online selling the size you need, either somewhat used or maybe even never sold, NIB, new in box.

You can search on ebay for example, and then save your search and have them email you every time something that meets your search criteria is listed. I've been looking for some obscure things for 3 years, finding them once in a while, but HDDs aren't obscure,

My other idea is to format the drive when it's not in the Roland. Use a computer to do it and make it no bigger than Roland wants. Just one partition, unless Roland allows more.

And do the formatting with a computer too, not the Roland. AT least if it fails, you'll get a better message and might be able to use hd software to learn why it failed. Run chkdsk or scandisk first to get rid of bad sectors.

And to connect to the computer, buy a Roswill RCW618, for 20 dollars including shipping at Newegg.com . It connects almost anything but a zip drive or floppy drive to a USB port, so it will have many uses.

See above.

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 21:56:51 +0000 (UTC), Meat Plow put finger to keyboard and composed:

A bit-for-bit copy doesn't care about the file system. It's a physical clone rather than a logical one.

- Franc Zabkar

BTW, big drives make more heat, iiuc, even when they're doing no more work. Is that true, people?

If so, does your roland provide adquate ventilation for a bigger drive. What will happen if it doesn't.

Anyhow, a reason to look for an old small drive.

Go to computer swap meets. Call or email your local ham radio club-- they run the computer swap meets, and ask them to put something in their newsletter saying what you want. The computer guys in the club probably have loads of small hd's around and don't know what to do with them.

For most places the next hamfest isn't until spring, but see if you can pick it up at the guys house or come to one of their meetings if he goes to the meetings.

To find out where hamfests (swapmeets with licensing exams, etc.) are, got to

Also, do you belong to a computer user group. They're like ham radio clubs but were started for small computers. There are 3 or 4 clubs in the Baltimore area. I used to go. They were given free software which they looked at and then gave away to members, or even non-members who showed up iirc. They used to answer technical questions, and I guess I stopped going when I found out about Usenet.

IF you ask nice, they too will put your request in the newsletter. They may charge for classified ads, or just offer them 5 dollars. Only about 50% of the ham radio events involve computers and fewer of the actual members. User groups are 100% computer fans. And they probably have loads of hardware they've never used.

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 21:42:55 -0000, "Gareth Magennis" put finger to keyboard and composed:

I would think that would be the way to go.

One thing to watch out for is bad sectors. If your "working" drive has any bads, then you need imaging/cloning software that knows how to work around bad patches in the media.

ddrescue and dd_rescue are two Linux based utilities that can clone a drive in multiple passes. They image the easy sectors on the first pass, and attempt the more difficult ones on subsequent passes. They can also image a drive in reverse. Reverse imaging effectively disables look ahead caching.

ddrescue:

HDClone is a Windows based imager:

Copyr.dma is a DOS based imager that can be used for smaller drives:

- Franc Zabkar

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 21:42:55 -0000, "Gareth Magennis" put finger to keyboard and composed:

What do you use for backup?

FWIW, here is a thread where someone needed to retrieve audio data from an Akai MPC2000 sampler:

The file system was a proprietary implementation of FAT16. As in your case, the MPC2000 used the drive for storage, not booting.

- Franc Zabkar

On 11/4/2010 8:38 PM Franc Zabkar spake thus:

... which should more properly be called a "sector-by-sector" copy. It's not as if you need to move each bit individually; that's handled deeeeeep down in the drive's firmware.

^^^^^

Well I'm all for cloning using a PC as long as the cloning software recognizes the structure of the disk partitioning. Most drives these days have a size limit jumper if your device's AT bios doesn't recognize drives greater that 137 GB. Good luck.

Depends on whether you count "gigabytes" as a marketing droid or as an engineer :-/

AFAIK, disk drive manufacturers have as always defined a GB as

was

Do you think a kilobyte is 1,000 bytes? And a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes?

As I said, marketing droids consider it to be 10^9; engineers consider it to be 2^30. (some folks use GB and GiB to clarify the distinction when speaking owing to the unwashed masses blindly following marketing hype)

I know I could have gone down that route, but I have an old drive myself that works, its just that it sounds like an Airbus with a blown engine. The new drive I bought is very very quiet - part of the reason I bought it. Don't forget we are talking a digital recorder where it is very likely the machine will be in the same room as the subject being recorded, so noise is definitely an issue.

The 2480 is not mine, I am repairing it for a customer. More importantly, I am hoping to find a generic solution to a generic problem here.

The cloning idea sounds great - you can use any off the shelf drive of any size and make it look like the original, a perfect solution in my opinion, as this is (hopefully) always going to work. I am not always going to have the time or inclination to hunt round computer shops for weird old s*it ;)

I'm getting an old PC out tomorrow and trying this cloning malarky.

Thanks,

Gareth.

On Fri, 5 Nov 2010 19:00:06 -0000, "Gareth Magennis" put finger to keyboard and composed:

You can make a 1TB drive look like an old 32MB drive. Gigabyte's Xpress Recovery BIOS has a bug that does just that. :-(

In your case, use HDAT2 to limit the capacity of your drive. It will then report its reduced size to BIOS and OS, making it indistinguishable from a smaller drive.

- Franc Zabkar

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