-=> 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. 

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

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

 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 difficult. 
 RJT> You try and back up a system that's actively running a multitasking OS
 RJT> and it can get real complicated,  in short order. 

Don't I know it.
 
 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.

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

I had to do that on a case where I was using the motherboard IDE
controller *and* a SCSI card. And when trashing old cases, I *always*
salvage the LED and keylock assembly. That way, if I *have* to, I can
take an LED & cable with the right connector on the end and do a tiny
bit of surgery to get an extra light if I need it.

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

 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. 

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

 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. 

That sounds like some of the QIC-80(?) drives we used at one job. I
wound up with three of the 20 meg units & cards. These used what looked
like a standard cassette tape with a notch in the middle of the back.
I've got a big box of the tapes too. The were nice because unlike the
drives that used the floppy controller *these* would do 5 meg a
*minute* on a 286 box!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are large enough to be *useful*. 

Oh yeah, I managed to pick up another of the 4(8)gig  *drives* a 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. 

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

 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.

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

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

I have a stack of the "old" cartridges with older IDE drives in 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. 

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

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

 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.

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

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

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

 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.

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

 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. 

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

Then again, check the docs for the motherboards in your systems. A
*lot* of "older" motherboards actually *have* USB support. The BIOS can
enable it, and there's a header to plug a cable and connector into. The
trouble is *finding* the right gizmo to plug into it. Most just have
one that plugs into the pins for the mouse port. And I've seen systems
that didn't even have *that*. I surprised the heck out of a few folks
when I managed to dig up the connector for their "ancient" computer so
they could have a PS/2 mouse or add USB. (and the ones who "upgraded"
to USB were the source of the mouse port hardware for the folks that
had been living with a serial mouse).

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

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

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

 RJT> True.

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

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

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


--- FMailX 1.60