Trying to copy/clone an HDD formatted in FAT16

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Rust

99 posts

Master Geek

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#296249 1-Jun-2022 19:42

Hi all,

I have an ancient IDE/PATA HDD formatted in FAT16 that I am attempting to upgrade to SSD. It contains a couple of essential files I need to copy across, problem is I can't read the drive.

To clarify, the drive is out of an aging machine tool. It works perfectly fine in the machine currently, but the machine itself does not have any functionality to copy the contents of the drive.

I have an IDE/PATA to USB adapter and both a windows 10 and 11 PC. When I plug the drive in it spins up and I get the USB connected notification sound, but the drive is not recognized in either explorer or the Windows disk management app.

The SSD that I intend to replace it with was working just fine through the same IDE/USB adapter right up until I formatted it for FAT16. Now it too is not recognized, which leads me to assume this is a compatibility issue between ancient technology and newer Windows.

Does anybody know a process I can use, short of finding an old Windows 98 machine, to access and copy the data over from the old to new drive?

Thanks in advance.

richms

28187 posts

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#2921559 1-Jun-2022 19:48

It should still show in cloning tools if it is connected. The only time I have seen partition information make a drive not show is when it had storage spaces stuff on it. That makes it hide from device manager and most tools as it gets passed into the storage spaces software instead. Still show for reading smart stats and stuff but not in disk manager.

I have not accessed really old drives thru a USB adapter since windows 7, but it worked fine back then with the one I had - It was a terrible quality IDE and SATA 2 bay thing to USB 2.0 and no troubles to get 20+ year old drives up and runnng and reading from them.

Richard rich.ms

Rust

99 posts

Master Geek

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#2921566 1-Jun-2022 20:12

Thanks. I am having a look at cloning tools now. Hopefully I can find one that will see the drive.

At first I assumed I had a bad adapter, but then the SSD worked for a time until I formatted it. The adapter shows up in device manager, but no record of a connected drive.

rhy7s

624 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2921585 1-Jun-2022 21:13

Does the SSD show up in diskpart (using list disk in CMD)? If so, does it become available to initialise again in the disk management GUI after using diskpart's clean command (definitely don't do this to your original disk).

Oblivian

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#2921590 1-Jun-2022 21:38

Encrypted/Drvspace (or even more old-school one with non standard boot sector defining partition to trick old bios to allow larger drive to be seen) will trip up new OS

You're best to ignore what windows says. And see if a linux based bootable cloner or disk analysis shows what you expect

Whatever you do, treat it read only. The moment you stamp something to it may render it useless.

Rust

99 posts

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#2921596 1-Jun-2022 22:07

rhy7s: Does the SSD show up in diskpart ...

Just tried this and yes, the SSD did show up and I am able to clean it.

I am going heed Oblivion's advice regarding trying a linux based cloning tool. I'll give that a go tomorrow on an old drive.

Cheers for the replies

1101

3122 posts

Uber Geek

#2921703 2-Jun-2022 09:13

I had to do this a few years back for a old CNC machine

I had to try 5 differnet brands cloning software before I found one that worked
Also , some cloning software will fail if there are ANY issues (unreadable sectors etc)
You'll want a clone tool that boots from CD\USB\Floppy .

Fat16, Id consider using Ghost . The original Floppy based Ghost , or the later CD based ghost. NOT the Win based Ghost
https://archive.org/details/cdromsoftware?query=Ghost

A basic file copy wont give you a bootable HD . Its not that simple .
But heaps of options if you only need to COPY a few files .

Rust

99 posts

Master Geek

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#2922070 3-Jun-2022 06:29

1101:

I had to do this a few years back for a old CNC machine

I had to try 5 differnet brands cloning software before I found one that worked
Also , some cloning software will fail if there are ANY issues (unreadable sectors etc)
You'll want a clone tool that boots from CD\USB\Floppy .

Fat16, Id consider using Ghost . The original Floppy based Ghost , or the later CD based ghost. NOT the Win based Ghost
https://archive.org/details/cdromsoftware?query=Ghost

A basic file copy wont give you a bootable HD . Its not that simple .
But heaps of options if you only need to COPY a few files .

I was actually looking at Ghost, but it was the Win based Ghost. So I know to avoid that now, cheers.

from old CNC forums it seems Clonezilla was the popular go-to back when this process was more common. It appears to be Linux based and employs a bootable USB.

Machine is in use currently, so I'll look at giving that a go over the weekend.

Luckily the machine does not boot off the disk, it is just used for storage. There is just 2 files containing machine setup information that I would like to copy. It should be possible to rebuild the files by direct data input at the console, but it would be very tedious.

From forums back in the day it seems cloning was the done thing, but I suspect that was mainly due to it being the simplest solution for machine operators back then as the machines all had different requirements and downtime was costly.

Luckily for me, whilst it is a productive tool, it's also a bit of a toy and I have the luxury of taking my time and enjoying the learning process from working on it.

Cheers

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ghettomaster

387 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2922088 3-Jun-2022 08:56

Just a couple of thoughts.

First of all, a +1 from me for using a Linux distribution to try and read it. If you don’t get anywhere, it’s easy to download older versions of Linux live images and give those a go too.

Secondly, I’d advise against using an SSD. I’ve known them to just lose all their data, and unlike a spinning disk, that’s harder to recover from. At least with spinning disks, the data is always there in some form and I would imagine performance for reading those files isn’t going to be an issue.

Lastly, make sure the bios sees the drive for what it is. WAY back in the day, we put a drive in a machine that was larger than what the bios supported. We went ahead and used a smaller number of sectors etc. and figured it’d be ok because it presented enough storage for what we needed. Problem is the drive can lose it’s way a little bit and data corrruption can occur that way. This hasn’t been an issue for a LONG time, but when you mention FAT16 we’re going back far enough that the memory comes to mind.

Oblivian

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#2922135 3-Jun-2022 10:11

Thats what I was meaning too. Or something like it

Use to have 256mb or so drive specs. Then the boot sector loaded a local driver that allowed expanded use

Then there was CSH (cluster sector head) nom auto discovery
Neighbours old game console bios batt died. He couldn't work out why I couldn't fix it after replacing... Custom sector details went poof

Rust

99 posts

Master Geek

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#2922154 3-Jun-2022 10:50

Fair point about the SSD. The standard mod operators used to do with this machine was to replace the HDD with a CF card in an IDE adapter. No such thing as wear levelling back then so I'm not sure how long they would have lasted.

Many machines from this era (late 90's - early 2000's) are definitely finicky about hardware specs, and to make it worse they are often not able to give productive feedback. Probably quite frustrating back in the day, kind of fun now though. It can be problematic purchasing compatible hardware these days. For example this machine has a PCMICA slot but it only accepts original SRAM cards up to 512MB, modern flash cards are not recognized. Not easy to get hold of now. The HDD I am trying to replace is 6Gb total capacity (manufactured in 2000) but has been partitioned to 2GB. Not sure if that is a machine limitation or a FAT16 limitation. Figure once I get a process sorted I'll experiment a little.

Cheers