S8100 hard drive cloning

[kbryii]

Hello. I am currently working on a system running an S8100. The drive is at least 15 years old and we are concerned that it may take a dive any time now. We thought it would be an easy process just to take the drive off the processor plug it into a laptop with a USB adapter and clone to a new drive. No such luck. When I connect this to my laptop with the usb adapter I cannot read the drive. However, it does show up in disk manager; but show as dynamic and invalid. Others gave some input that it could be due to jumper settings on the drive. I tried all possible jumper configurations but no success. I also then tried installing the cloning software directly to the PBX but it would not run from there at all. Any suggestions? Ideally we want to just clone the existing drive to a new drive.

Kbryii
Alcatel-Lucent Certified Field Expert

 

[kyle555]

Try linux? maybe the partitions however they were done aren't natively readable to windows?

 

[kbryii]

Thanks kyle555 i thought of that as well and I am going to give clonezilla a shot. However, i feel it should show up as the system is running windows 2000 and I am pretty sure the drive is formatted with NTFS.

Kbryii
Alcatel-Lucent Certified Field Expert

 

[kyle555]

It's before my time - I guess those did run Win2K! The only comparison I'd have is Nortel's BCM pre4.0 - it ran on WinNT. And those vendors first stating to make server platforms on commodity OSs and hard drives seem to have done their best to make sure some guy like you doesn't get in that hard drive and pilfer their Windows ported version of their software.

Maybe Acronis or Norton Ghost would be good? Otherwise, I wouldn't tempt fate by playing with that drive. What's the replacement process like? If the serial number for licensing is on the S8100 blade, just reinstall?

 

[Wanebo]

It's possible that system is using a feature of NTFS called EFS (Encrypting File System) and therefore no other system would be able to read that drive. I've had some spotty luck cloning such drives using clonezilla. I think that's because to be a bootable disk for Windows the clone needs to be an exact image (same partition, same starting cylinder, same disk type, etc).

 

[kbryii]

I'm not sure that it is efs. I do t think it is. Norton ghost almost works. We started running it on the system and it gets to about 20% and the system turns off. I think the system has some kind of timer that is not allowing it to run for an extended time with the pbx services running. Clonezilla was a total fail.

Kbryii
Alcatel-Lucent Certified Field Expert

 

[janni78]

You might have better luck following the replace hard drive section of the installation manual.
Basically you install the software on a new drive and restore configuration from backup.

"Trying is the first step to failure..." - Homer