Ok so here's the thing, a while back I accidentally won a non working desr-5000 on ebay, it was kinda trashed and non functional at all. Only 2 days after I mistakenly won it I also won another, same model, that works great. So I get the working one first since it shipped from within the usa, and the trashed one a few days later. SOOOOO I open up the trashed one, clean everything, pull it all completely apart and low and behold after I put it back together it powers up!!! except it only gets to static after the psx logo because there is no hard drive, and no hard drive because it was faulty to the point where in neither let the psx turn on or the computer I tested it in (O_O) so I pull the drive from the working one (i'm pro at opening these now) and put it into the trashed one and it works again, like it was never broken. So here's my problem: I need a backup of the hard drive from the working psx to put into the other psx so that I can have 2 working psx and sell the trashed one (at that point it would only be cosmetically trashed) on ebay and buy hardware from lingjr on ebay. I have been on a computer forum but advice I get there is useless. It all leads back to software that will simply clone the drive. This would be good except for the fact that the drive is completely unreadable by all 3 major OS's. Is there a way I can get a clone of this drive without depending on an OS to be able to read its contents? Its formatted in a way that neither windows, mac os, or linux can read.:banghead:
I may have put this in the wrong section, I wasn't sure, I just thought it would fit in better here but If it needs to be moved its ok. (also i'm new here and didnt realize there was a homepage with more sections)
What exactly do you mean by "completely unreadable"? The physical drive does not show up in Windows' Device Manager, or no drive letter(s) appear(s) in Windows Explorer?
windows will see a drive but it wants to format, same with disk utility in mac os, its there but no volume is mounted and the drive information is blank.
Okay, so it recognizes the drive but cannot parse the partition table. That is perfectly fine; a regular PS2 (and I'd expect the PSX to work in a similar way) uses APA partitions which normal PC or Mac operating systems do not support, so they report the drive as blank. Try to use "dd" to copy the entire drive's contents to an image file. Something like this should work: dd if=/dev/sda of=<path to image file> bs=8192 dd is installed by default on Linux. For Windows, you'd need something like Cygwin. I don't know about MacOS, but would expect it to be available as well. Change "sda" for your drive's name, and specify some normal filename as the argument for of. The name of the drive depends on the order your OS scans its adapters; on Windows, you can have a look into Disk Management to get the number of the drive ("Drive 0"=sda, "Drive 1"=sdb and so on). On Linux, just search for an sd? that has no associated partition devices (if "sdb0" or something like that exists, the system recognizes a partition structure on "sdb", so this is not your PS2 drive). Depending on your setup, you may have to use "hda" instead of "sda", but that is unlikely for modern systems.
try a linux distro also as far as i know the drivers are sony made with magic gate just like ps2 fat drives so my suggestion is buy a ps2 drive off ebay and then use a linux distro to clone the drive
SilverBull is right, DD it... To the OP: Listen to SilverBull. Not only does he REALLY know what he's talking about when it comes to PS2 stuff, but also he is absolutely correct about the APA partitioning, which I believe is then formatted PSFS (playstation filesystem is what I've been told) and so it makes sense you are having trouble. I would just dd it like SilverBull says. If you don't want to install linux, just get a copy of the "System Rescue CD" which is a Linux boot cd based off of Gentoo, or just grab the latest Knoppix (another bootable Linux distro, the original) and do the DD under the Knoppix session. One thing I would suggest to avoid possible overwrite of drives you do not intend: when doing the DD, unplug any other drives but the one you are copying and the one you are copying to. Makes the whole thing easier. Anyway, listen to SilverBull. Regards, npt :nod:
