Cloning hard drive on Accumatic control...how to ?

1997 Cincinnati Falcon turning center with A2100 control. Hard drive starting to act a bit "iffy". How best to clone...while drive still in machine or take it out and rig into desktop internals for cloning ?

And if the drive craps out beforehand, how much $$ am I looking at from Cincinnati Lamb to get new software ?

Maybe the easiest thing to do would be to yank it and take it to one of those disk recovery services – I’ve seen several pop up in my area.

If you wanted to do it yourself, you may or may not be able to do it by yanking it and putting it in a PC that had two spare drive ports with the correct interface (your drive is probably AT) – one for the bad drive and one for the new drive.

This may or may not work. It will depend on the software you have and the how the bad drive was formatted. An example of what may work would be using the old Dos xcopy command and hope the bad drive had a compatible format and file structure (DOS), which it might have being of ’97 vintage.

Ideally, the software tool you want is one that will do a low-level sector-for-sector copy – this type of utility does not even care if the drives are formatted. I use to have program I wrote that would do this for either AT or SCSI drives and ran under DOS – I’ll look and see if I can find it. If not, you might be able to find this type of utility on the net. This is probably the method that a disk recovery service would use.

plm

Use a program called Norton Ghost, it's cheap. I used it to clone my Fadal HDD, several times for backup.

I was warned by Cinci (or was it Siemens?) not to plug the drive into a Windows system..... It might mess the drive, some partitioning issue, or something.. I'd have to check my notes.
Check Ebay, there are replacement drives for $80 for that control. You need your backup files and the codes for the purcahsed options to rebuild the new drive.

They suggested you can clone it in the control itself with a different cable, or on an older W3.1 system with Ghost. Newer Windows systems will supposedly munge something in the files or directory.
Pete

several things can legal copy YOUR data

1: ghost .. works fairly well as long as it's a wintel based system (fat, fat32, ntfs, hpfs, etc)

2: bit copy ... kinda obtuse to use

3: any of the linux forensic software will ABSOLUTELY duplicate the drive... check on ebay for "fire" "linux" "bootable"

jeffe

DO NOT use a Windows Based Cloning client. From past experience you'll be pissed. I messed up a second machine by tryuing to clone its drive for a first one having issues.
1. Do a machine backup, all data. Prefereable to do this to a remote network drive if it has an ethernet card,or a parrallel zip drive as an alternative.
2. make sure you have the ethernet card drivers, etc.
3. from the service screen record all the software versions.
4. cloned drives that have started acting "wierd" have about a 50/50 shot fo being"fixed by direct cloning. a new drive loaded with exec and ready to reload as your machine is 800 plus installation.
5. If in doubt, call siemens...Dave Lisle is the best to talk to.

What's Siemens got to do with it...did they take over the Vickers controls ?

Cincinnati sold its Vickers ESD( Electronic systems division) to Siemens. The same people, the same location, different sign above the door. Those blasted Kollmorgen drives they used on them things are nearly impossible to find decent priced except thru siemens in my vast research. The basic exec software is not something given out, but the application software( available thru Cincinnati as well) is and can be downloaded from an FTP site.

Don -
If it's a standard HDD, (IDE or SCSI) I would get a hardware drive tool, similar one of these:

http://www.logicube.com/products/hd_duplication/echo.asp
http://www.storageheaven.com/products/DuplicationHardDrive/EconoDupe.asp
http://www.upgradesolutions.com/products/solo.htm

Actually, come to think of it - I probably would want to have one on hand; anyway, considering your line of business... (I know it's a little pricey; but it will clone a drive regardless of what's on it, how it's partitioned, etc)

Just my $0.02...

That's pretty cool Hammer...I didn't know such devices even existed ! Thanks

Now....new weekend has started...dare we expect air skates by Sunday night ?

Re: air pucks... Perhaps - on a limited scale... and no, I didn't forget...

Last weekend was rather nice... this weekend is nasty - it's gotta be over a hundred in the garage (no AC - yet, anyway... I gotta break down and go buy one of those window-mount units we were talking about in that other thread) and the humidity is killing me (that's what happens when it rains in June! ). But; I've got a small compressor; and I should be able to do a trial in the kitchen... just don't expect me to try to drag 10000 pounds over the linoleum (when the air's not on, the footprint of it would ruin the floor - not to mention, how would I get something that big in the house, and over the carpet? )

P.s. - yes, I did go out and give everything a fresh coat of oil, so I'm hoping it doesn't get too much condensation on it from the humidity.

And I did kinda' find the problem with the RV's power - something is pulling about 7 amps on the mixer/vacuum circuit (yeah - it's got a built-in vacuum cleaner; when it was new, way back when, it was the top-of-the line that Beaver made; we got it second-hand for a whole lot less ) ...I figure it's a rat-sistor, of about 17 ohms... and every so often it goes to a dead-short, popping the breakers...