Re: XySearch server back online again

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Harry Binswanger  on Wed, 11 Jun 2003
14:27:46 -0400


>> XySearch is back up. Patricia Godfrey deserves all the credit; she
>> suggested a method of attaching a notebook hard drive to a
>> workstation IDE adapter;

> Is that by means of some physical adapter, which means unscrewing the
> laptop case? I'd be interested to hear (maybe privately rather than on the
> list, or would others like to know?).

Harry:

You need to remove the laptop HD from the laptop. So, yeah, you gotta open the
case. That's the easy part.

The hard part is getting the data off the HD. I bought the adaptor (this was
Patricia's contribution -- I had no idea these exist -- e.g. at
www.cyberguys.com, "Mount a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" drive bay"), and connected it.
The 44 pins on my laptop HD aren't identified (pin 1...44, which is 40 pins of
data just like IDE, plus 4 for power), and it could easily go on backward
(which would fry the HD, applying power to the first 4 data pins), so you have
to trace the wires on the HD's board to make sure you're got the right
orientation. OK: I plugged it in to the IDE connector, tried to boot --
Win2000 froze halfway through bootup, couldn't find "any boot device".
Probably because all laptop HDs are set to Primary master drive. No jumper on
this HD to turn it into a slave drive. So I unplugged the desktop machine's
HD, and tried to boot solely with this laptop HD. Still no joy, not recognized
as a boot device. So I booted with a Win98SE diskette, and it saw the HD!
Great. Now what? I've got one billion bytes of data on the HD, and how do I
get it off -- 700 floppy disks? Created a bootable network diskette, using
Bart's Network Diskette (http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/network/), which works
great as long as you have one of the (100 or so) supported network adaptors.
This uses W98 together with M$'s old DOS networking from 1992, which is pretty
limited, but better than nothing (e.g. you have to map a network share to a
local drive,
NET USE Z: \\REMOTEMACHINE\SHARENAME). After fiddling with archaic permissions
handlers, I got connectivity to a machine where I could offload the billion
bytes. New problem: Win98SE can't read NTFS file system on my laptop HD, and
Partition Magic declines to convert back from NTFS to FAT32. Went to
SysInternals and got their read-only driver for DOS-NTFS. It works, more or
less, & I XCOPY the data over to another machine. New problem: Case of
filenames is not preserved by the old M$ networking for DOS! 28,000 files
transferred, all UPPERCASE FILENAMES ONLY. Perl/Apache/Namazu/Linux demand
case sensitivity, can't even find their own (painfully crafted) configuration
files...

And blah blah blah. This give you some idea of what's involved? Not sham pain.

The worst part was, when all done, I discovered that my backups from last
January were 99.99% complete. I thought that I had made crucial changes
subsequent to my last backup, and it turned out to be untrue. I could have
just gone with my backups, and it would have worked. Grrrr&%$#@!

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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