Acramatic 2100 hdd

[Amtec]

Hi
I have a cincinnati 1000 with Acramatic 2100 when powering up i get a blue screen of death saying the it can not asses the boot sector. Help please as i do not want to buy a new hdd from Cincinnati.

[guru]

On A PC Blue screen like that most likely comes from the Ram than the HDD,
You might want to check that out first, may just need re-seat or cleaning.

I changed the power supply on Sabre1000 once I could swear that the HDD was just an ordinary HDD with ordinary 40pin IDE connector, only smaller capacity. But loading the software would be the hard part.

[laka]

The HDD's are standard drives. 40GB I think.

Even if the boot sector (master boot record) is damaged, most of the time the rest of the files will still be ok. You'll probably need to get another hard drive to copy the original onto. Just make sure you don't to any drive copying or modifications using a system that runs Windows XP - it will mess up the file system on the drives. Best thing to do is to do it all on the machine itself.

Get yourself an old Dos boot disk and boot the machine up from the floppy. Then you can do some more thorough investigating. To copy the drive you'll need to get a copy of Norton Ghost that can run under dos and from a floppy disk.

This technical bulletin from Siemens will give you some more insight on backing up the HD.

http://members.shaw.ca/jasoncmckenzie/A21_049C.pdf

good luck

[flyinphill]

Originally Posted by laka The HDD's are standard drives. 40GB I think. Even if the boot sector (master boot record) is damaged, most of the time the rest of the files will still be ok. You'll probably need to get another hard drive to copy the original onto. Just make sure you don't to any drive copying or modifications using a system that runs Windows XP - it will mess up the file system on the drives. Best thing to do is to do it all on the machine itself. Get yourself an old Dos boot disk and boot the machine up from the floppy. Then you can do some more thorough investigating. To copy the drive you'll need to get a copy of Norton Ghost that can run under dos and from a floppy disk. This technical bulletin from Siemens will give you some more insight on backing up the HD. http://members.shaw.ca/jasoncmckenzie/A21_049C.pdf good luck

Laka,

I don't know if you remember me, but I bought a Sabre 750 with a 2100 control about 1 1/2 years ago. We were chatting about backing up the hard drive, and you gave me some great help. But I have still never performed a backup, primarily because I have never been able to figure out what versions of Ghost can be used on this older equipment. I have tried to get someone in the computer business to just come and do it for me, but no one has ever actually showed up when they said they would.

Today, when I went to start the machine, I got a warning: "boot disk failure, insert boot disk" etc. It finally did start after about 5 or 6 attempts, then seemed to run normally. But I have a bad feeling that my hard drive is about to die, so I need to get this backup done ASAP. If you can help me with where to find a copy of Ghost, or at least help me with what version I am looking for, it would be greatly appreciated.

Phill Davis
Razor Motorsports

[laka]

If you can wait until Monday I can email you the software. I found it online somewhere, I just searched for Norton Ghost 6.0, this is the version that will work. Once you have that, you'll need another hard drive and a IDE cable that will work with two drives. Take note what kind each drive is, you'll have to do some trial and error to get the original drive as master and the new one as slave. Sometimes they need to be in the proper sequence on the IDE cable. Once they are showing up properly in the bios setting, you can boot with a boot disk, then switch to the ghost disk and run ghost. It only takes 10 minutes maximum. I would recommend making two backups since the one you are replacing sounds pretty much shot.

Anyway, if you cant find Ghost trough google or anything, email me laka0(zero)@hotmail.com and I can send it to you.

If you have basic computer skills, you should be able to handle this no problem.

Good luck
Jason

[flyinphill]

If you could send that to me, it would be very helpful. I have looked in the past, and have never been able to find the correct version of Ghost. I even tried to buy it new. In fact, I have been looking for the last while and the closest I can find is Ghost 2003. It is supposedly bootable from a floppy, but I have no idea if it is compatable with Windows NT or not. I also pulled the covers off of the back of the workstation case and my machine has a dual HD power cable, but it doesn't have dual IDE connections, so I will have to try and find that tomorrow. Is there anything specific to look for or stay away from when I go to get the hard drives, besides just IDE format?

I already have the 6.22 boot disk that you previously pointed to, so hopefully the Ghost will let me get this done. It is strange how this happened, because the machine has worked flawlessly since I have had it. The hard drive gave me no indication of any problems until today, so I am crossing my fingers that I can get it copied before it dies completely.

[laka]

Check a used computer store for the IDE cable, or even if you have any old computers lying around. As for hard-drives just look for the smallest capacity you can find. Windows NT will only recognize up to a certain size anyway, so there is no benefit at all in using a very large hard drive.

Here is a link I found for Norton Ghost

http://www.oldversion.com/download.p...d307423a9cbd2d

I think you need to install it, then copy it to a disk (or there may be an option to install onto a disk, I forget)

You should be all set with these last couple posts. It really isn't that hard to do.

Let me know if you need any more info.

Jason

[flyinphill]

OK,

I booted up the machine on the boot disk and found where to set the bootup order, so that part is handled. I also had an old computer here at the shop with a cable that I hope will do the trick on the dual IDE connections. I took part of the covers off of the case, and it looks like replacing that IDE cable is going to be a task. The cable is plugged into the back of the mother board and is unaccessable without removing the MB. But getting it out looks like it requires removing all of the cables and then sliding all of the control boards out first. The only other option would be possibly sliding the motherboard towards the power supply first, then sliding it out of the cases, leaving the rest of the boards intact. Do you recall what you had to do to get the cable replaced?

I also downloaded Ghost from the site you pointed out and checked that it is correct as well. So there isn't much else I can do until I get some drives. But that brings up another discovery during all of this. The readme file with Ghost says that NT 4 can't use a drive larger than 8GB unless it has service pack 4 installed. My machine has NT 3.51, and the readme file is unclear whether the 8GB limit is an NT 4 problem only, or whether it is NT 4 and all earlier versions. So if you are using 40GB drives, what OS and service pack do you have? And are you having to do any partitions, or is it working with no partitions?

As a little bit of side information, I also found the parts list from Siemens, and it says that the part number on my original hard drive is only 640 meg. Thats right, .64 gig. Its hard to believe that computers only a little over a decade could even function on that small amount of space. Times change quickly in the electronics world.

[laka]

You should be able to swap in the new IDE cable without removing any of the cards or motherboard. Remove the aluminum cover from the sides and back, and I think once you slide the HDD out there is just enough room to remove the old cable and replace it. I know that I didn't have to pull any cards, it was tricky but I did get it.

I remember on our machine it took a few tries to get the master/slave sequence correct in the bios, it seemed that it mattered where each drive was on the cable and also check the pin settings on the HDD's

As far as HDD size, don't worry. Just get whatever smallest size you can. When Ghost does it's thing it will set everything straight. It makes a partition with the proper size, and the rest is left unusable.

Also, when you're done - just leave the new IDE cable in there. Makes things easier if you ever have to copy the HDD again.

[flyinphill]

Originally Posted by laka You should be able to swap in the new IDE cable without removing any of the cards or motherboard. Remove the aluminum cover from the sides and back, and I think once you slide the HDD out there is just enough room to remove the old cable and replace it. I know that I didn't have to pull any cards, it was tricky but I did get it. I remember on our machine it took a few tries to get the master/slave sequence correct in the bios, it seemed that it mattered where each drive was on the cable and also check the pin settings on the HDD's As far as HDD size, don't worry. Just get whatever smallest size you can. When Ghost does it's thing it will set everything straight. It makes a partition with the proper size, and the rest is left unusable. Also, when you're done - just leave the new IDE cable in there. Makes things easier if you ever have to copy the HDD again.

Well, after 2 days off pure headaches, we finally got the hard drive cloned.

Our first problem came when we went to put the dual drive IDE cable on the motherboard. I know that you stated you did this without removing the motherboard, but there was absolutely no way that could be done in my machine. We had to completely remove the motherboard from the case to do this, because the cable passed through a gap between the edge of the motherboard and the back of the case that I couldn't even get the tips of by fingers between. If you did it as you described, then our machines must have computer components from different suppiers, or of a different design.

Once the cable was situated and the machine reassembled, our next problem came when we first tried to use Ghost 6.03 to create the clone. Ghost wouldn't work at all because it was seeing a non-empty NTFS log file. After about 2 hours of internet searching,we finally found a switch to add to the end of the DOS prompt for Ghost. The switch instructed Ghost to ignore the log file.

Once that was sorted out, we found out that Ghost would not let us use a hard drive larger than 7.8GB, because NT does not support them. We then took a couple of used 4GB drives and cloned them. These cloned, but when we tried to use them to boot the machine, we found out that the boot sectors were copied in the wrong place. After several attempts, with multiple drives and with both a disk-to-disk and sector-to-sector copy, it still never worked.

So then, we moved to a more advanced copying software. A computer specialist I paid to come help me had brought it with him. When we tried to use that, it kept getting hung up in the same spot during cloning. He ended up performing a surface scan and found a defective sector. It was out of the used portion of the drive, so he just performed a repair function. After that, it successfully completed the clone. But, once again, the cloned drive would not boot up. After about 3 hours and multiple attempts to clone, with several different capabilities within his software, we still had nothing useable.

So next, we used another version of Ghost, this time the Ghost 2003 that I had found originally. This version booted up, copied all of the drive successfully, and had no issues with the NTFS log file or the too-large hard drives. But even though they cloned, the drives larger than 7.8GB still would not work.

As I said, an absolute nightmare. Once we got some software that worked, we made 2 successful and 1 unsuccessful clone in about 30 minutes, but it took us 7 hours to get there. And believe me, I left out most of the details, like the 50+ times we had to take a disk in and out of the machine.

So Laka, I am curious: Exactly what OS system, and what service pack do your machines have? Are they NT 3.51 or NT 4? There has to be something different between our machines.

[amirkhan792004]

any one have acramatic 2100 software.. I like to install new Hdd in my cincinnati arrow 1000 and setup first win NT then install Acramatic 2100 if any one have please email me.