Z3100/Z3200 drive cloning/backup/firmware

[cyruspy]

afaik the z3100 was always PATA, z3200 started with SATA from the beginning.

Found a dusty IDE to USB adapter. Same ATA password works for that IDE/PATA Western Digital drive from the Z3100.

Interestingly enough, even though I tried to use sparse files, it seems dd copied it block by block in the end (no savings). After passing the file through gzip,it went down in size about 92%.

amer:~ # dd conv=sparse if=/dev/sdb of=/home/z3100.hdd.raw-dd bs=10M
3815+1 records in
3815+1 records out
40007761920 bytes (40 GB, 37 GiB) copied, 1470 s, 27.2 MB/s

amer:/home # du -hs z3100.hdd.raw*
38G     z3100.hdd.raw

amer:/home # gzip z3100.hdd.raw

amer:/home # du -hs z3100.hdd.raw.gz
3.6G    z3100.hdd.raw.gz

The second partition of the z3100 drive holds de root filesystem, etc/fstab looks like this:

amer:~ # cat /mnt/etc/fstab
#
# See fstab(5) for more information
#
# spec   file   vfstype   mntops   freq   passno
#
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1  /boot   ext3    async,atime,auto,dev,exec,rw,suid,nouser        1       1
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2  /       ext3    async,atime,auto,dev,exec,rw,suid,nouser        1       1
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3  /standard       ext3    async,atime,auto,dev,exec,rw,suid,nouser        1       1
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5  swap    swap    defaults        0       0
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part6  /vpm    ext3    async,atime,auto,dev,exec,rw,suid,nouser        1       1
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part7  /data   ext3    async,atime,auto,dev,exec,rw,suid,nouser,data=writeback 1       1
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part8  /plots  ext3    async,atime,auto,dev,exec,rw,suid,nouser,data=journal   1       1
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0      /mnt/cdrom0     iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/floppy/0   /mnt/floppy0    auto    noauto,owner    0 0
none    /proc   proc    defaults        0 0

Recreated via mount as:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2       979M  314M  614M  34% /mnt
/dev/sdb1       125M  6.3M  112M   6% /mnt/boot
/dev/sdb3       3.0G  1.6G  1.3G  57% /mnt/standard
/dev/sdb6        11G   60K   11G   1% /mnt/vpm
/dev/sdb7       8.9G  518M  7.9G   7% /mnt/data
/dev/sdb8        10G  120M  9.3G   2% /mnt/plots

/mnt
Emergency root filesystem is here

/mnt/boot
Boot loader data

/mnt/standard
root filesystem. Includes an interesting "Changelog" file (why would you remove vi Jaume?!)

/mnt/vpm
Empty, no idea what it's for so far..

/mnt/data
Scratch area?. I see some icc files, references to updates, logs.

/mnt/plots
Some .bkz files, can't identify anything I've sent to the printer.


Any word on how much RAM can the board support?, 1GB?

Edit: I was looking at the rescue system running Montavista 3.x, the one market as /standard is the main/production root with Montavista 4.x

[cyruspy]

Well, it seems I bricked my z3100 (at least for the time being).

Changes I made to the removed formatter:
1. Enable SSH
2. Allow SSH in the firewall configuration
3. Set root password
4. fsck on all the filesystems after unmounting
5. Change the battery to a brand new Duracell (CR2032) just to make sure it's not a problem.

After installing the formatter again, I get an audible alarm and 0% in the boot progress bar.

Given your experience, do you believe any of the steps in particular contributed?, Did you set the root password for example?

Will revisit tomorrow,

[GST]

wild guess, because I never tried that: leave the root password untouched (empty)

[cyruspy]

Left the root user without password. Didn't work.

Also, I succesfully booted a virtual machine using the physical disk and it booted until a failure trying to access hardware which is not present (as expected), so it's not damaged.



Today fully restored the disk with the original image I took, will try once more to boot.

If it fails, probably I killed the board somehow (static electricity?). Looking for SATA boards at Ebay, anybody knows the recipe to wipe the HDD to machine mapping to allow any disk to be used?

[cyruspy]

wild guess, because I never tried that: leave the root password untouched (empty)

The printer boot/initialization still fails with the original image restored (all changes reverted, only the new CR2032 battery is in the picture.

Same results as before:

0% in boot process
+
08:11 error.

Probably I damaged the hardware somehow.

I'm waiting for another set of RAM module + PATA disk. That would be my next attempt.

The last one would be to get a new formatter from LPS (around us$ 200). On the bright side, it would give me a SATA interface, on the not so bright side, it seems newer formatters don't have removable memory modules.

[cyruspy]

Happy to report that after reseating the memory module it booted successfully.

[Loek49]

Hi, I have some experience with PATA discs in a Mercedes Comand navigation system. The 40GB discs are password protected. I have found a method on the internet to make these discs accessible and to copy the data. I have connected such IDE disks to an old PC with IDE, via an IDE-USB it does not work. The PC boots with MS-DOS. With MHDD.exe the drive was unlocked with the password. Clonezilla (LINUX) can then copy the disk. Someone discovered the password through a sniffer between the IDE. If the disc is reinserted into the Comand, the lock will reappear.