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imaging scsi drives on new machines, any experiences?

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luckybob

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I generally prefer SCSI in my setups, and when dealing with pre-pci macs its a requirement. I find it immeasurably convenient to have a USB/IDE bridge for backups, transfer of files, etc. My goal is to image drives as backups, in case I screw up something, transfer files, do basic functionality tests. Right now I use an XP machine for this, and it works, but i'm lazy and if I can make my current win7 desktop do the work instead and only have one machine on my desk, so much the better.

I have three options

1. suck it up, buttercup
2. USB to SCS adapter $50 plus
3. installing a pci-e scsi adapter and hot-plugging the drive. most likely the Adaptec 29320LPE.

I have no experience with #2 or #3. In fact, I've always just assumed #3 was impossible without special drives and controllers. The drives I tend to use are sometimes very old 50 pin drives. I'm leaning towards #2, because i would save my last pci-e slot and USB is just so damn convenient. Speed is really not a factor here.

Thoughts?
 
Any reason that you'd want to use Windows for this?

Personally, I'd just use Linux and dd the things. Since these are vintage Macs, why not an older machine with a PCI SCSI card like the Adaptec 2940?

SCSI's SCSI in most vintage cases.
 
Its what I use in my garage. I've tried Linux multiple times over the years, and I just cant get into it. And I am currently using an older machine with scsi to do this. Its just not convenient. I basically have to set it up on the desk anytime I want to use it.

Having a usb > scsi adapter would make everything stupid easy for me and take up practically no space. Or the pcie scsi card and hotplug. I only have one pci slot in my win7 pc and it currently has an old ide card installed for my ide zip and ls120 drives. I do have an open pcie slot. I'm hoping someone here has personally used either method and can provide some insight. I could easily just buy the usb adapter and hope for the best, but if I can save the hassle of re-selling it, should it not work, I will.
 
I had poor success with SCSI-USB adapters.

My preferred option in your case would be to remove (temporarily) the PCI IDE card and install the PCI SCSI card you already have. Do the imaging. Return the systems to their normal state. PCIe SCSI cards should accomplish the same feat but seems to be an unnecessary expense for a single use.
If you choose a normal PCI or PCIe SCSI card from a major manufacturer like Adaptec, drivers should be baked into whichever recent operating system you choose.
 
luckybob said:
can you elaborate on this?
Click to expand...

Not hot pluggable; have to turn on the SCSI drive before turning on the PC with USB. Frequently would disconnect forcing a reboot to see the SCSI drive again. I have not seen every SCSI-USB adapter so I hope the ones I used were unusually deficient.
 
SCSI to USB adapters are, were and always will be absolute crap. It's literally as simple as that.
Good for scanners and printers. Kinda okay with optical drives but slow and unreliable with fixed disks.
Now if you want to daisy chain devices on a USB card HAHAHAHAHHAA, why are you not using a proper SCSI controller at that point?
 
And one strike against Windows and SCSI...

SPTI - Microsoft's own version of a SCSI API. So bad in the early days, that Adaptec offered ASPI32 (which was standard on Win9x). ASPI was well-defined, with a good following. SPTI, not so much. In theory, you can devise applications to use either, but that doesn't always work out in practice. I've got SPTI apps that work on one version of Windows but not another; SPTI is supposed to be the same.

At least under Unix/BSD/Linux you don't have to worry too much--SCSI whole-volume support is built in and has been since the early days. There are plenty of imaging utilities there.
 
I'm using windows 7 here. Its been very good to me so far. even when it comes to my ls-120 & zip drives
 
I tend to do this sort of thing on a Linux box:

#Re-scan the SCSI channel:
echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/host1/scan
#list devices
lsscsi
#Image whole drive
dd if=/dev/sdc of=image.img
#delete the device from the channel (id 4)
echo 1 > /sys/bus/scsi/drivers/sd/1\:0\:4\:0/delete
#repeat all over again for next drive.

You may be able to do this with the cygwin "Linux" for windows. Although this does have some issues. For example i have never been able to successfully tar to a tape drive. There is/was a bug for that issue.

If your looking for something small, you could build a Mini-ITX or small backplane system with a removable drive tray. I have a system that i use like this for awkward IDE drives, that my cheap IDE-to-USB adapter wont talk to.

Don't know if you could use a PCI riser, perhaps a flexible style one, to get 2 PCI slots out of one. Never tried this myself, but there seems to be an array of stuff for rackmount stuff. Bit of a mess though.

I have never had a problem with hotpluging SCSI on Linux, but i have always set aside one channel for this kinda thing. There used to be EZ-SCSI from adaptec that would let you rescan the bus etc, i only ever used it on an ancient Mac tho.

Personally i cant fathom how you get by using just one computer.
 
OK I get it. you people use linux and I don't. GOOD FOR YOU.

I'm probably just going to get the pci-e card. Worst case scenario, I would just have to power cycle the machine.

I have my main system, and one in the garage that gets used for everything else. It uses an old server board and works very well. ls-120/zip/5.25 floppy/cd no problems.
 
Sorry I didn't mean to beat in to you USE LINUX! USE LINUX! ONE OF US! ONE OF US! Pray to Bob Dobbs!

Cygwin is not actually linux, it is just some programs compiled for windows that acts like linux/unix. Its capability is limited, but its surprising sometimes how it can communicate with hardware. You can run most of the programs, at the C prompt IIRC.

EZ-SCSI *may* still work on a modern system to rescan the SCSI bus, save having to reset the system each time you add a drive.

I think you can do something in windows device manager, or whatever it is called in post-XP-windows. "scan for new hardware" should get windows to search for a new device on the SCSI bus. If it is anything like Linux though, i would recommend removing the old drive first from the device manager, then reconnect the new device, then do a scan. On my system, if the drive is the same ID as the drive that just got removed, it gets confused, and thinks the old drive is still there.

Alternatively you could just use potatoes.
 
sorry, I did not really mean to lash out. Its like 95F (35C) and my aircon hasn't worked all year, so i'm a bit grumpy.

In windows CLI, there is a utility called Diskpart. I know there is a refresh command, so I would assume it can work with scsi drives getting moved around.
 
krebizfan said:
Not hot pluggable; have to turn on the SCSI drive before turning on the PC with USB. Frequently would disconnect forcing a reboot to see the SCSI drive again. I have not seen every SCSI-USB adapter so I hope the ones I used were unusually deficient.
Click to expand...

I'll add my experience with a Xircom PortGear PGSCSI I have here. These things go for a lot more money now than they did new, but I had one that was purchased new when they were actually 'new,' before Xircom got bought by Intel.

My experience is with Linux, for several reasons, not the least of which is that the PGSCSI isn't supported properly (as I recall) under 'modern' Windows, but it is well-supported under most enterprise Linux distributions like CentOS, which is what I use.

I used the PGSCSI connected to an SGI DAT drive (through a 25pin to 50 pin Amphenol adapter) to do audio DAT dumps from about 36 DAT's for archival purposes for a local radio station. It worked flawlessly, and, at least on CentOS 7, the PGSCSI is completely hotplug/hotunplug.

I have had good luck with a firewire to SCSI case for disk imaging, too, and recovered some DEC VAXstation 4000/90 disks using it.
 
I know you hate linux BUT hear me out.

There is a "ready to go" menu based set of tools called 'Clonezilla' which will do this for you. You can download it from here and either create a bootable CD or flash drive (http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php). All you need to do is put the USB/CDROM into its drive, shutdown your computer, install the SCSI drive, reboot and then choose to either boot from CDROM/USB. It does not install itself to your hard drive and runs 100% from the CDROM/USB.

Clonezilla is it's own operating system (yes Linux....) but you do not need any command line options or anything like that to make it work. It will load up to a menu, you can then choose to image either partitions or an entire drive. If you then follow the prompts you can choose to save your drive image to another drive in the machine OR across your LAN to another server etc. It will then clone the drive and you are free to reboot back into Windows.

If you get stuck or don't understand a particular option people on the forums will help you out. I think you'll be fine with it though as it does explain every step.

People here aren't trying to push you into using Linux, it's just that drive imaging from within Windows doesn't work that well. We have all tried it and failed at some point, whereas the Linux based imaging works perfectly.
 
I don't hate linux. I don't use it because I'm not a software engineer. I hate dealing with software. I use windows because I can plug it in a go. Honestly Android is what linux should be. Hell, all my hardware is VT-x enabled, so if I honestly cared I could just VM linux. I do it for XP when I need to run a 16/32 bit program.
 
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