Question: I have a 200 MB Western Digital 2.5″ IDE drive, originally from an Amiga 1200, that I would like to try to get an image file of, so I can keep the data that is on it.
Since the drive is very old, and has been sitting in an attic for 20 years, I want to avoid powering it up unless I have to, it might fail at any time.
My first attempt was to buy an external USB hard drive enclosure (specifically this one https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B002UZRRXG/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1).
The drive spun up when connected to USB and Windows correctly identified the drive as a Western digital drive, but all the imaging tools I tried showed the drive size as 2.2 TB, not 200 MB. They also reported errors when trying to image the drive. I also tried directly mounting the drive in WinUAE (an Amiga emulator which supports reading data directly from physical Amiga hard drives) to create an image file, but the drive showed as “ACCESS DENIED” when running as a regular user and didn’t show up at all in WinUAE when running as an administrator.
I then tried booting into Linux (drive spun up again!) and simply doing
dd if=/dev/sd
But then I just got lots of input/output errors when reading from /dev/sd. Linux didn’t get the name and manufacturer correct, but still showed the drive as being much larger than 200 MB.
I suspect that the firmware in the enclosure cannot handle the old drive and this is the cause of these issues.
Next I’ll attempt a cheap IDE-SATA converter and connect it as an internal SATA socket and see if that works better. Are there any other options or maybe known good converters I could use?
I don’t have a computer from the mid nineties, otherwise connecting to that would probably work.
Is there somewhere I can manually enter the number of cylinders and heads and override the bad size reported by the enclosure?
Answer: