how to get a backup image of your Adept 550 hard drive

[smitchell]

How to get a back-up image of your Adept 550 robot hard drive.

Using a PCI SCSI adapter with standard 50-pin cable, and a SCSI
laptop drive adapter, the 2.5" SCSI drive from an adept robot
controller can be connected to a PC to recover data. 

Load the kernel module for your scsi card: 
Using a Symbios 53c810 SCSI card type:
   modprobe sym53c8xx   
A second example,
if using an Adaptec AHA-2940 pci card as I did, type:
   modprobe aic7xxx 
To tell if it is detected (and where), type:
   dmesg
The output of dmesg will show that you are connected and what
your computer calls that device.  Mine was detected as scsi
generic sg5 type 0.

Note: No partitions will be detected on the hard drive, as it
uses a whole-disk filesystem. Make sure you have room on your
hard drive (size of the disk, mine was 512 mb), then dump an
image of the entire disk to a file by using the dd command:
   dd if=/dev/sde of=adeptscsi.img
sg5 corresponds to sde on my system, substitute for yours as
needed.

This image of your drive (named adeptscsi.img, above) contains
a FAT filesystem, but cannot be mounted because Adept uses a
non-standard media descriptor byte. 

To modify the image so it can be mounted, load the image into
any hex editor (in this example, khexedit).  The Adept media
descriptor value is 0xf2 and is found at 3 places in the image.
The standard value for a hard disk is 0xf8, so this must be
changed three places:
OFFSETS:
Location   local   absolute
----------      ----------------
Boot sector   0x15   0x00015
FAT #1      0x00   0x00200
FAT #2      0x00   0x10000

After those values are changed, the image can be mounted just
like a disk drive as a loopback device. 
Type: 
mkdir /mnt/adept
mount -t msdos -o loop adeptscsi.img /mnt/adept/

The filesystem is now accessible at /mnt/adept/, and files may
be copied, tarred, edited, etc..

   ls /mnt/adept    (to get a directory)

To write the image back to a new or different hard drive, you
have to reverse these steps: 
Use a hex editor to modify the 3 occurrences of the media
descriptor byte back to Adept's value of f2.  Unmount the
drive:
  unmount /mnt/adept
Use the dd command to write the image back to the new drive:
  dd if=adeptscsi.img of=/dev/sde

If you normally use Windows, I am sorry--probably best to find
a local guy who is familiar with Linux.  These steps may be
possible in Windows, certainly with a hex editor you can modify the
three bytes needed, but I wouldn't know how to tell windows that
a disk file is now a hard drive.  And it is safer to load an image
to work on than it is to work directly on your drive,
in case of mistakes.

[Jim Tyrer]

thanks smitchell, It must have taken some determination to pull this off and share it with us

Think it might it be done with a live cd for folk that don't run a *nix?

[skommany]

Thanks for this great info. I have been looking for a way to back my CX controller flash card. I was going to try the Linux route but this may be better.

[pitl]

If you use AdeptDesktop with the CX controller you can use the Backup Utility of the File Manager to backup a complete image of the CF card.

pitl

[bruceboty]

thanks smitchell, It must have taken some determination to pull this off and share it with us

Think it might it be done with a live cd for folk that don't run a *nix?

I had helped a customer to change their SCSI Harddisk 'casue it was damaged by some mistake two years ago. All the backup after the installation is done by the very much slow floppy disk. You can image my feeling when do this, which caused me want

[irobot]

Try WinHex under Windows