[clug] Hardware projects: R-Pi and 'ddrescue' on Debian to salvage a c1994 PC

[steve jenkin]

I was impressed with this guys technical and writing skills.
Not only did he recover an old PC (made in Australia) he had enough Win-95 knowledge to force it into submission.

The story is long and detailed - I’d suggested skimming and just reading ’top and tail’ - but this guy, IMO, is _good_ at documenting what he does, what he tries. That’s really valuable for anyone trying to replicate this sort of task.

But the centrepiece for me is the lack of detail & comment about using Debian & ‘ddrescue’ to recover an IDE drive.

It’s like “C” being described by Bill Plauger as “wallpaper” - you just expect it to be there and “to Just Work”.
no drama, no ‘make-work’, no fees: boot and go.

I liked the ’salvage’ article - lots of detail - but he’s a very sensible approach.
	- uses ‘ddrescue’ on Debian to salvage the IDE drive. Almost 3 weeks & 12,500 passes
	- having seen it boot my moving disk image to a working drive,
		he moves the whole thing to a virtual machine.

The R-Pi article is a bit of fun. I’m sure other people have multiple of them running in their roof space :)

cheers
steve

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Project: Raspberry Pi Door Sign in Under an Hour!
<https://www.element14.com/community/people/lui_gough/blog/2015/07/20/project-raspberry-pi-door-sign-in-under-an-hour>
 - runs multiple R-Pi’s “in the roof”
 - was this worth money doing? if the parts are free and your time is cost nothing, maybe :)

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Salvage: Techway Endeavour II Computer (Part 1 &2)
<https://goughlui.com/2018/12/30/salvage-techway-endeavour-ii-computer-part-1/>
<https://goughlui.com/2019/01/06/salvage-techway-endeavour-ii-computer-part-2/>

Conclusion

It was a struggle of sorts but most of the hardware in the box was just fine. The hard disk was very much on its last legs, but with persistence, I was rewarded with a full image with no lost data. The clone was bootable, once BIOS barriers were understood, bloatware removed and software misconfigurations corrected.

Virtualising the image proved to be a slight challenge as well, with VMWare being resistant to proper graphics emulation on the Windows 95a install. It turned out that DOSBox was the best alternative, even though it had to be slowed down to ensure correct behaviour.

A stroll through the install was a time capsule of mid 90s/early 2000s memories, with the machine last used in 2003. Old software bought interesting nostalgia. Browser caches, e-mail inboxes and ICQ chat logs were also recovered, showing that things haven’t really changed all that much when it comes to the types of messages they send. It was interesting to see some of the old websites, even if they were missing the images, as some of these sorts of things aren’t preserved by the Wayback Machine.

There may well be another part to this story in the future – when I try to fix the remaining niggles with the floppy, IDE controller secondary port and perhaps upgrade it to run some sort of demonstration. But that probably will still be a while.

--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

mailto:sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin