Bad Hard Drive

[judleroy]

I have a 1997 Bmc 30 with ultimax 3 controls. The hard drive is made by seagate and is 681 mb. I know the drive is shot and needs to be replaced.
Hurco charges 750.00 for a replacement and 250.00 to reload software. I have all the original disks and the backup disks but am not 100 percent they are good. If there good does that mean I can reload the os to a new drive with them? Do I have to use the exact same drive or does anyone know of another that will work? I guess i'm just hoping I don't really have to spend 1000.00 dollars on a hard drive. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks Judleroy

[bloke]

Any old drive will do, although Western Digital were to be avoided at one stage. Best if it's sized larger than 400MB. Usual BIOS settings were:
1024 cyl
16 heads
65535 wpcom
1024 lzone
50 sectors

You'll need a copy of the file combine utility and a copy of the bootsector loader.
FDISK the drive to have a primary 10MB partition (set as active).
FDISK the drive to have a secondary (D:\) partition using the remainder of the drive.
Format C:\ and volume name as EXECUTIVE_1
Format D:\ and volume name as PART_PROGS
Copy HURCO.LDR as the first file to C:\ (very important that this is the first file loaded after a format).
Copy EXECPROG.001 from floppy to C:\
Copy EXECPROG.002 from floppy to C:\
Run the file combine utility to make EXECPROG from the two smaller files.
Add the V1 Bootsector from the utility disk.
Copy the rest of the files from your floppies to the C:\ keeping them in the same directories as they were in in the floppies (ie: A:\config\v1_64\vector4.sys must be copied to C:\config\v1_64\vector4.sys)
Copy the LEADSCRW. file to C:\

Job done.
(All the above is assuming you had version 1 software).

[judleroy]

Bloke thanks again for your willingness to help and expert advice. I'm in the process of moving the machine to a new location and setting it back up so it will be a week or two before I get to try things out. I'll let you know how it works out. I'm guessing the files you listed should be on the four backup disks. I think its around ver 1.7 of the software.
Judleroy

[fasto]

When you get that machine set back up, I can give a hand setting up a flash drive instead of a hard disk, if you'd like. You should be able to get a Compact Flash card, and an IDE interface adapter for less than $50. This arrangement is what I have been using in all my embedded PC's for that last 5 or 6 years.
--
Aaron

[cheetahcnc]

Originally Posted by fasto When you get that machine set back up, I can give a hand setting up a flash drive instead of a hard disk, if you'd like. You should be able to get a Compact Flash card, and an IDE interface adapter for less than $50. This arrangement is what I have been using in all my embedded PC's for that last 5 or 6 years. -- Aaron

The flash setup sounds interesting.

[judleroy]

Thanks fasto that would be awsome! Would I load the software onto the flash card just like it was a regular hard disk? Would that mean I don't need to get a replacement hardrive? If so i'm all in and appreciate it!
Judleroy

[fasto]

Judleroy, yes, you would do all the steps that Cliff outlined, just using the flash disk instead of a hard drive.
In a quick Google search, I found "Syba SD-CF-IDE-DI Card reader" for about $7, then the flash card of your choice.
Remember, though, flash cards have a short life if the host operating system writes data to them frequently. I don't know what OS the BMC30 uses, or how much it writes to the hard disk. Modern Windows systems, XP & Vista, are very bad about this and write data to the hard disk almost continuously. I have used Windows 98 off of a flash card, and I think it worked OK. Regular MS/DOS works fine.
You might want to make 2 flash cards, just in case the first one has a short lifespan. This would keep you running, using the 2nd flash card, until you changed back to a rotating hard drive.

In my case, the equipment that I build uses embedded linux, and I have disabled writing data to the flash card (except for certain very specific files). I have not had a flash card wear out in 5 or 6 years of use.

[judleroy]

I believe that the hurco is a dos based program. The operating system is ultimax 3. I think thats right atleast. It is a hurco dedicated system. The machine is a 97' and the original hard drive was less then 1 gig. I hope to be able to use a large sd card to be able to hold more programs. I have a few more questions if thats ok. Will this work just like there were a real hard drive?(able to delete unused program or is info permanently written to drive) Also can I replace my 3.5" floppy drive (after using it to load the backup disks) with one of these ide sd card readers. If so that would be great because it really sucks breaking up programs to fit on 1.44mb floppys. The machine does have rs232 ports but I have yet to find a cable that would actually work for dnc. I do know the ports test good but can't find a source for a working cable. Anyways I do like the convienence of the floppy but sd sounds better.
Thanks again
Judleroy

[fasto]

Hi judleroy,
the Compact Flash works exactly like a hard drive. You can put files on it, delete them, rename them, whatever. The only difference is that you can put files onto and delete them on a hard drive essentially forever, but the Compact Flash card (and all flash based technologies) can only be written to around 100,000 to 1 million times. The CF card has automatic wear leveling, as it's called, to distribute the writes across the flash memories inside, but they eventually wear out. A DOS based system will last much longer than, say, Windows XP - this is because Windows XP is continuously re-writing the swapfile on the hard disk.

To replace a floppy with a flash disk is possible but it is not a drop in replacement. Some companies make a device that pretends to be a floppy drive to the computer, but you plug in a flash disk of some sort. I don't have one of these and I haven't used one. I can't remember what companies make them. Try a search using "floppy disk emulator" or some words like that, they'll probably turn up.

I won't have to worry about these issues, because my Ultimax 2 system boots from a bunch of EPROMs (if I can ever get it working). I do have floppy drives, though I don't know what they're used for or if they work. I haven't got that far, yet, still trying to fix the servo drive.

I'm sure that we can get the DNC working once the machine is back running.
--
Aaron

[Rally]

I think that the Ultimax 3 is build on Unix.
What is the advantage of having a flash drive over a HDD? I don't see it!
We still have a 1991 BMC20 setting around that was a demo before our company purchased it. the Mill has a Seagate 1.2G HDD and has never failed yet.

[judleroy]

The problem is that my hard drive has failed. I think the advantage of the sd card for me would be that I can make a copy of the disk and when it fails I can just change out the disk. Hopefully I will also be able to store a hard backup in my home computer to have a way to make new sd cards. Lastly I think I could benifit from being able to take the sd card out of the machine to add and remove G-code files and do disk cleanup. I will have to see how it works out.
Judleroy

[majid]

HI!HI!
I have one Hurco bmc 30 with Ultimax 2 controller ,I can connect with Ultimax 2 controller via RS232 ports and transfering My G_codes Programs to cnc machine But ,not more than 60kb capacity,Please advise me How I can Transfering longer Programs via DNC Connection??