Leonard Erickson wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 -=> Quoting Roy J. Tellason to Leonard Erickson <=-

 LE> Well, to run things like Drive copy, you actually boot to *DOS* (or
 LE> something stranger) and do the copying from there. Drive Copy
 LE> allows saving a drive as a file, with varying degrees of 
 LE> compression.

 RJT> Yeah,  depending on how much stuff is already compressed...  So it
 RJT> essentially runs its own OS,  huh?  And whatever it is doesn't have a
 RJT> problem with large drives.  Interesting. 

 LE> I think it runs DR-DOS 7.05, which is DR-DOS 7.03 patched to 
 LE> support FAT-32, but it doersn't nessecarily support long filenames 
 LE> or some such. It's used by a number of companies on stuff like 
 LE> bootable CDs.

 LE> Hopefully, the new owners of DR-DOS will make the changes to the 
 LE> 7.03 code needed to make a 7.05 that isn't limited that way.

New owners?  I think I missed something here,  again.  No surprise there.  

 LE> You may be able to run DriveCopy (or similar programs) from 
 LE> Windows, but for what I'm doing, it's best to run from DOS and boot
 LE> off a floppy, so that Windows can't mess with the drive you are 
 LE> copying.

 RJT> Makes sense.  That's one of the things that makes backups 
 RJT> difficult. You try and back up a system that's actively running a 
 RJT> multitasking OS and it can get real complicated,  in short order. 

 LE> Don't I know it.

I still need to get something organized,  for my linux box.  Build a list
of files and don't worry about what's not on the distro,  for starters, 
and see how much room that'd take up...

 LE> But basically, you've got the "rack" or "bay"
which goes into a 
 LE> 5.25" drive slot. It's got a power connector, an IDE or SCSI 
 LE> connector, and for SCSI, drive ID jumpers. And sometimes, a tiny
 LE> fan.

 RJT> They do the drive ID in there?  How odd.

 LE> Sure, otherwise, you will run into problems if you move as 
 LE> cratridge from one system to another, and it is set for an ID 
 LE> that's already ion use on the second system.

I can see where that wouldn't work too well.

 LE> They also have a lock & key so you can lock drives in place. Some
 LE> have the power connected to the key so a drive won't get power
 LE> unless it's locked in. And there's power LED and an "access" LED
 LE> (for the bus, not the individual drive). There's also 7 segement
 LE> display on some of the deluxe SCSI units that display's the drive
 LE> ID (0-F).

 RJT> I've often thought that they oughta have more lights on stuff.  I know
 RJT> that with some drives you have a little two-pin LED connector on the
 RJT> front of it,  and with this system before I lost the one SCSI drive I
 RJT> had the red "HDD" led for the IDE drives,  and the
yellow "turbo" LED
 RJT> plugged into the SCSI card.  It was interesting to watch,  sometimes. 

 LE> I had to do that on a case where I was using the motherboard IDE 
 LE> controller *and* a SCSI card.

Just so.  No MB stuff here,  it's all plug in,  but then,  this is a 486
we're talkign about here.

 LE> And when trashing old cases, I *always* salvage the LED and 
 LE> keylock assembly.

As do I.

 LE> That way, if I *have* to, I can take an LED & cable with the right 
 LE> connector on the end and do a tiny bit of surgery to get an extra 
 LE> light if I need it.

Not that I've needed such all that often.  And they seem to be into using
different shapes of LED,  just to complicate things a bit.  And of course
there are some cases where they stick all of them along with the buttons on
some little board,  and then use a pretty non-standard connector to go to
the MB.  More common in some of the proprietary low-profile boxes,  I
guess.  One of the interesting bits I scrounged was out of a machine that I
*think* was labeled Wester Digigal,  an XT-class box I think.  It had a
little LCD display in there,  though I don't know what they did with it. 
It's smaller than the other ones I have on hand,  and just might fit into a
drive bay.  I have to rig a small board,  adapting its connector to the
sort of ribbon cable connector that would go to a parallel port inside the
machine.  This has some support under linux,  where I could display system
load,  or whatever.  The only thing I haven't figured out yet is the extra
2-wire connector (both the same color),  I'm thinking it's for a backlight
but have no idea what to feed it.

 LE> And the keylock switch assemblys can be handy too. I have plans to
 LE> make some "props" using some of this stuff.

Dunno what I'd do with those,  I don't use the ones I have here.

 LE> Even if the racks support hot swap, most OSes don't. So you power
 LE> done the system swap a drive in or out, and power back up.

 RJT> I'm not certain,  but I *think* that you can do it under linux for a
 RJT> RAID 5 array.  My recollection is that it's okay with the OS (or the
 RJT> driver maybe) if it's okay with the hardware.  But then maybe you've
 RJT> gotta do something to tell the system you've put another drive in
 RJT> there. 

 LE> I could probably get away with it on Netware, just by doing an 
 LE> UNMOUNT on the drive, pulling it, then doing a MOUNT on the new 
 LE> one. I'll eventually find out when I have a ZIP or Jaz drive in the
 LE> server.

Mounting and unmounting works under linux,  too.

 LE> Oh yeah, the front of the crartridge can be "broken" out by 
 LE> breaking a few tabs, allowing you to put in things like Zip drives,
 LE> Jaz drives and various tape drives. I've got Jaz drives and a 4 gig
 LE> tape drive in SCSI cartridges. I'm not sure if I want to put the 24
 LE> gig DAT drive into a crartridge or mount in in an external drive
 LE> case.

 RJT> I've got one Archive tape drive that seems to take a proprietary
 RJT> interface card,  uses a 50-wire ribbon cable and since it's an 8-bit
 RJT> ISA card it doesn't give you a whole lot of choices about IRQ and DMA
 RJT> settings,  which it needs one each of. 

 LE> That sounds like some of the QIC-80(?) drives we used at one job.

The confusing thing about those QIC numbers is that some of them refer to
tape standards,  and some of them refer to interface standards or software
interfaces.  I think the one I have was QIC-02 in the software end of
things.

 LE> I wound up with three of the 20 meg units & cards. These used what
 LE> looked like a standard cassette tape with a notch in the middle of
 LE> the back.

I actually have 2-3 tapes like that,  figured they were for data but in
what I had no idea.  The ones I'm referring to above are way bigger, 
though.

 LE> I've got a big box of the tapes too. The were nice because unlike 
 LE> the drives that used the floppy controller *these* would do 5 meg 
 LE> a *minute* on a 286 box!!

Wow.  And they held 20M?  Sounds handy.

 LE> A friend just didn't understand why I thought they were so much 
 LE> better than his Colorado drive until I finally got it thru to him
 LE> that I I could back up a 40 meg drive, using two tapes, and 
 LE> *verify* the backups in under an hour.

I bought a Colorado 350 new,  and wasn't aware before I did of the annoying
noise those make.  The ones for the bigger tapes aren't as bad,  I guess. 
Nor was I aware of them taking as long as they did.  I got a total of 10
tapes at that time,  figuring that'd be good for 2 backup sets,  and
eventually it took more than 5 to do a full backup.  Eventually I stopped
using it,  I don't remember exactly why.  It's currently installed in the
linux box but I don't recall if it's even connected or not,  and I'm in no
particular rush to do anything with it even though I've since acquired more
tapes in that size.

 LE> I've gort a similar unit that's external and was supposed to do 150
 LE> meg with the larger (almost the size of a paperback) tapes
 LE> cartridges. Never could get it to produce a backup that'd verify
 LE> ok.

The bigger tapes I have sound like they'd fit that description.  I knew a
guy who had an external unit that would take those,  but he had problems
with it.  You still had to install a proprietary interface card to plug it
in.  I guess that the makers assumed you'd have one drive and multiple
cards or something.  I also have what appears to be an external case for a
Colorado,  though I don't currently have a floppy card with the required
connector on it.

 RJT> I also have a couple of "floppy tape" drives,  a Colorado 350 and
 RJT> another one,  I think perhaps a Conner or something,

 LE> I've got at least one of those around here somewhere. It's a pull
 LE> from a friend's system when they gave up on it.

 RJT> plus a SCSI drive that seems similar to the other one that takes 
 RJT> "big" tapes.

 LE> I'ver got a bunch of opddball SCSI drives that I've picked up as 
 LE> part of trades over the years. Include a bunch of old Syquest 
 LE> cartridge drives of various sizes, some with media.

Syquest did do some interesting things over the years.  Too bad they
weren't more successful.

 RJT> There's a whole mess of tapes in a box here, but the most I can 
 RJT> store on one of them is about 256M,  so I can't get too excited 
 RJT> about using these.  I have *one* tape in that sort of package 
 RJT> (DC-600,  etc. style) that claims to store 1.2G,  and my brother 
 RJT> has a pile more of those,  but I haven't got a drive that 
 RJT> supports it.  (Yet?) 

 LE> I got the 4 gig (8 gig compressed) Travan 8GB drive and a coupe of 
 LE> tapes. Then somebody local offered a bunch of the tapes at $10 
 LE> each. So I now have about a dozen. the 24 gig drive takes standard
 LE> DAT cartridges, and I got 6 with it.

 LE> They are large enough to be *useful*.

Yeah.  Particularly since I have linux software that will allow for backing
up on one machine stuff that comes from all over a LAN.  That would only be
worth my while to mess with if I got either something that was capable of
storing a *lot* on one tape or some sort of a changer,  and I've never even
seen one of those.

 LE> Oh yeah, I managed to pick up another of the 4(8)gig  *drives* a
 LE> while back. Which also helps. 

 LE> Well, *large* SCSI drives are expen$$$ive.

 RJT> Yeah.  They're always more pricey than IDE,  but the performance
 RJT> overall is better,  I'd think. 

 LE> Probably. I also liked being able to have 7 (or 15 with newer
 LE> drives ) drives off of *one* cable.

Yeah,  if you have a case that supports that many drives.  I have some big
cases here,  and have thought that it might be nice if somebody would make
an adapter kit that would allow mounting *two* small drives in a 5.25"
bay.  

 LE> Even less than current ones go for a fair bit.

 RJT> I know that this one deal my brother mentioned was seriously cheap, 
 RJT> but that was because they had some oddball connector,  and we'd need
 RJT> to get adapters for each drive.  I can't recall the specifics,  but
 RJT> maybe they were designed for hot swap or something.  Last time I
 RJT> looked what was out there wasn't that cheap,  but I haven't looked
 RJT> lately,  and probably should.

 LE> I've got several that use SCA(?) connectors. The adapters aren't
 LE> too bad if you can get them at dealer prices.

I'm not sure if that's what those were or not.

 RJT> I suspect that I'm going to have to get myself some of those adapters
 RJT> that let you mount a 3.5" drive in a 5.25" bay.  I also
suspect that
 RJT> I'm going to want to add a nontrivial number of fans to that box. 
 

 LE> Well, for not *that* much more, you can get a rack & cartridge 
 LE> combo. The IDE ones are $215-50, depending on where you buy them.
 LE> 50 pin SCSI runs about double. Not sure what 68 pin SCSI runs as
 LE> the only one I have I was given.

 RJT> That's getting up there,  particularly considering the drives being so
 RJT> cheap these days and all.  The major benefit there being that stuff is
 RJT> removable,  and I don't see a need for that just yet.  It *would* be a
 RJT> nice way to back up,  by comparison with other media,  and you could
 RJT> yank it out in a hurry if you had to for some reason,  but that's
 RJT> about the extent of it.  Maybe I'll take a look at such stuff if I get
 RJT> the chance. 

 LE> Well, using them for backup is why we sell most of ours. Also,
 LE> since the older IDe units used a 40 pin cable to connect to the 
 LE> drive inside the cartridge, folks with the newer HDs had to 
 LE> replace them. Which led to a lot of space racvks and old 
 LE> cartriudges. You see, while you *can* order the rtacks and 
 LE> cartridges seperately, the price is the same for a rack+cartridge 
 LE> as for a rack or a cartridge alone. So we always buy the combos.

Hmm.

 LE> I have a stack of the "old" cartridges with older IDE drives in 
 LE> them sitting across the room. :-) 

 LE> You can buy *cases* for multiple external SCSI devices. Basicly a 
 LE> "minitower (or even full tower) case, but with no motherboard 
 LE> related stuff, just drive bays, fans, a power supply and SCSI
 LE> cabling.

 RJT> These are in their own cases already,  quite substantial ones at that.
 RJT> Almost as big as a compact desktop case.  I can see them sitting on
 RJT> the shelf across the room,  in a stack that's got a PS/1 at the bottom
 RJT> of it,  and that only sticks out about an inch on either side,  maybe
 RJT> a bit more.  Not that much difference front-to-back,  either. 

 LE> Ah. The "aircraft carrier" type cases. They were made that big 
 LE> primarily so you could set a compact Mac on top of them. When Apple
 LE> changed to a more conventional design for the computer, you started
 LE> getting ones that were a *lot* smaller.

These might have been made for use with a mac?  Hmm.  Got up and looked, 
they're Toshiba XM-5100A,  and each has a button (for eject?) and power,
disc, and busy lights,  plus a headphone jack with a volume control.  As I
recall they also had a pair of RCA jacks on the rear,  as well.

 LE> BTW, one of my old *modems* is almost that big!

That's big,  for a modem.  Biggest ones I have are about the size of a
C=1541 drive,  although in a much nicer case.  These are 9600 for 4-wire
links,  and aren't "smart" in the usual sense,  though they have
a separate serial port that goes to a board with a z80 on it to monitor the
operatiosn of the rest of it.  Dunno what I'll ever do with those,  except
maybe use the cases for something.

 LE> as well as a 6-in-1 USB card reader.

 RJT> Eh?  What are you talking about here?

 LE> It's an adapter that you plug Compact Flash, Microdrives, Smart
 LE> Media, etc cards into and they appear as drives. The one I have has
 LE> three slots, each takes two types of media that use the same
 LE> connector.

 RJT> Oh,  ok.  Sounds nify.

 LE> I've found the box for the readerrt since I wrote that. Here's the
 LE> scoop: 

 LE> One slot for Compact Flash Cards & Microdrives.
 LE> One slot Smart Media
 LE> One slot for Memory Sticks, Secure Digital Cards & Multimedia cards

 LE> Mempory sticks are the slow ones at 621 kb/sec. The rest run over
 LE> 900.

That's a lot of pretty specialized stuff,  that I'm not sure if I'll ever
encounter or not...   Although it strikes me that it _would_ be handy to be
able to deal with it if I ever encountered any of that stuff.

 RJT> I too am thinking about a camera,  but haven't even looked at what's
 RJT> out there yet. 

 LE> I'm also going to order some *small* ones from an outfit that sells
 LE> IDE to CF adapters, along with a couple of adapters. Some of my
 LE> *old* gear that runs DOS will do quite well with a CF card 
 LE> replacing the HD. and it'll last longer and likely be faster than
 LE> old IDE drives.

 RJT> Yeah,  I can see how that'd fly pretty good.

 LE> Heck, if I can find the right sort of "baby AT" motherboard, a 
 LE> broken laptop that's broken the right way, or one of those 
 LE> "industrial controller" type boards I may be able build a nice
 LE> little "black box that will run a node just fine and have no moving
 LE> pasrts and not a lot of heat.

Trouble with most laptops seems to be in the area of the parts that supply
power to the rest of it,  from what I hear.  Regarding more
"standardized" hardware and few moving parts,  you might do a web
search on something called "Route66".  This was a box designed
for automotive installation,  with one HD, a rather different power supply,
 and interface through a keypad/LCD combo as I recall.  I think I have a
magazine article around here someplace that talks about it,  if you can't
find it.

 RJT> I have been thinking about getting a USB card to plug into one or more
 RJT> of these boxes,  since so much stuff seems to be coming that way these
 RJT> days and I don't have it in any of the sytems here (yet). 

 LE> Well, USB 2.0 cards aren't too expensive and they are very fast.
 LE> But I notice that some of them don't support USB 2.0 under Win 98
 LE> or 95.

 RJT> I'm not worried about that OS at this point.  There's support for USB
 RJT> in linux if you're running a 2.4 kernel or later,  which is not a
 RJT> problem. 

 LE> Well, I've got an older USB card that I salvaged out of a system 
 LE> that was traded in, but I want to hold onto it for a while yet. 

 LE> Then again, check the docs for the motherboards in your systems. A 
 LE> *lot* of "older" motherboards actually *have* USB support. The 
 LE> BIOS can enable it, and there's a header to plug a cable and 
 LE> connector into. The trouble is *finding* the right gizmo to plug 
 LE> into it.

Exactly.  The gizmo seems to be in scarce supply,  if it's even out there. 
I just looked,  and can't spot the connector in the linux box,  though I
thought that there was one in there.  Too many ribbon cables and such in
the way.  I did spot a couple of other ones that I hadn't noticed before, 
though,  labeled IR1 and IR2 (as well as being marked CON9 and CON10), 
these are 4 pins,  single row.  I wonder what those are all about?

 LE> Most just have one that plugs into the pins for the mouse port.

Oh?  I had to get the gizmo for that,  when I switched from a serial to a
PS2 style mouse.  The pin header was there,  on the MB,  but no other
connector.

 LE> And I've seen systems that didn't even have *that*. I surprised the
 LE> heck out of a few folks when I managed to dig up the connector for
 LE> their "ancient" computer so they could have a PS/2 mouse or add 
 LE> USB. (and the ones who "upgraded" to USB were the source of the 
 LE> mouse port hardware for the folks that had been living with a 
 LE> serial mouse).

Interesting.  I was thinking about a trackball a while back,  but the only
one the store I was in had in stock was USB.  It was also too small, 
compared to some that I've seen.

 LE> Heck in one case, the person was using a Bus mouse, and I was able
 LE> to get them set up with a PS/2 mouse.

Other than running out of convenient low IRQs,  I can't see much reason to change.

 LE> I've made a point of buying the extra gizmos for my systems even if
 LE> I didn't intend to use the ports at the time, simply because I
 LE> *might* want to later.

Most of the stuff I got new came with all of that,  if the MB supported it.

 LE> I haven't used multiboot much, but it's a useful option for "just
 LE> in case".

 RJT> True.

 LE> One thing we had for a while was a backup of a "virgin" Windows
 LE> setup. Basicly, we installed Windows on the box (from a copy of the
 LE> CD in a subdirectory on the hard drive), then went into device
 LE> manager and deleted all the devices that weren't very generic. Then
 LE> we stuck the boot *floppy* for Drive Copy in.

 LE> We made a backup of the setup, and then we could "clone" that drive
 LE> onto the cartridge drive, and stick it in a troublesome system and
 LE> see what happened when it booted off *that*. 

 LE> It was occasionally very informative to see hardware ID just fine
 LE> and the drivers install and the nachine work just fine. That pretty
 LE> much pinnede down problems to Windows being messed up. In which
 LE> case we'd copy all the files on the user's drive to a directory on
 LE> the backup system, reformat his HDS, reinstall Windows, and then
 LE> after it was installed ok, copy hois old files back to a
 LE> subdirectory on his system. He'd still have to re-install all the
 LE> software, but the config files and data files were there. 

I guess that supports the "re-install" I've heard about being so
necessary so much of the time.  Have you ever heard of any particular
causes for that sort of behavior?  I know that what we have running here
(one w98 box) seems to be pretty stable,  for the most part,  but mostly
it's a bunch of games for the grandkids.  Very seldom will I fire up word
to do a single-page document or something of that sort.  And some people
seem to have to re-install fairly often,  from what I hear.  I've no clue
as to exactly why that should be.

Thankfully,  none of the rest of what I run here has that sort of a problem.

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