Date   : Wed, 04 Aug 2004 01:50:23 +0100
From   : jgh@... (Jonathan Graham Harston)
Subject: Re: Winchester user manual scan anywhere?

Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...> wrote:
> There's some interesting stuff on the drive, including some references
> and details on Brazil (the OS as used on the ARM Evaluation Kit IIRC),
 
Drool!
 
> mysterious thing called ARX (see
> http://www.fact-index.com/a/ar/arx.html), and what appears to be an
 
Drooooool!
 
I'd love to have a play with a copy of whatever you recover from the
drive.
 
> how long this drive will last before it goes pop - I'd certainly not
> expect it to last the few hours needed to transfer data with Xfer
> (assuming Xfer can work with hard drives and not just floppy images
> anyway)
 
XFer should just use the file paths you tell it to. If you tell it to
transfer ":4.fred.jim.sheila" it should do it. I've only ever played with
version 3.00 from 1998 which had a lot of hardwired any assumptions
built into it. Never having had a machine I could run the sever end on
within less than a mile of my BBCs I haver used it much. (Anybody fancy
writing/compiling a RISC OS version of the server?)
 
You could use the "ADFS Utils"'s backup program to back it up to ADFS
floppies. How big is the drive?  The biggest 8-bit Acorn ADFS hard drive
I've seen is 30M, so that would go onto 40x640k ADFS disks (assuming the
drive is full), from which you could transfer onto a RISC OS machine.
Thence, it could be copied anywhere.
 
According to Jon's Winchester User Guide, which I've borrowed to
photocopy, "[BACKUP] enables data to be backed up from the Winchester to
floppy disks or vice versa". I've uploaded BACKUP 1.31 from the Acorn ADFS
Utilities Disk to http://www.mdfsnet.f9.co.uk/temp/backup.zip
 
Ah! I've seen later in the thread that you've found another Rodime drive.
Yes, theoretically formatting the drive tells it to use 256 bytes/sector.
The way to check is to format it and try writing to it. Save quite a few
medium- to large-ish files and see if it can read them back.
 
If the well drive is the same size or larger than the sick drive, then
if you format it to the same size as the sick drive then
*backup <sick drive> <well drive> will clone it, wasting any unused
sectors at the end of the drive.
 
-- 
J.G.Harston - jgh@...                - mdfs.net/User/JGH
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