Clone Arcade HD

FrizzleFried

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What is the easiest way to close an arcade Hard Drive?

The Cart Furl I have uses a hard drive. It's 12 years old by now. I'd love to clone that bad boy and run the new drive keeping the old drive as a backup.

Also, does anyone know if the Midway Vegas system will recognize an 80GB HD?
 
BootItNextGeneration (now called BootItBareMetal). Tiny app fits on a floppy or thumb drive, only a couple MB in size with DOS GUI that allows you to do bit by bit cloning of any drive at the sector level ignoring file systems/etc.. www.terabyteunlimited.com.

Will not work with any system that hashes the serial number of the device into the data of course. The data will be the same but not match the hardware.
 
If it were me I'd just burn a new one using CHDMAN and the Cart Fury CHD from Mame.

Also, I don't think an 80gb drive would be an issue, I've used 40gb and 80gb successfully on Midway's Seattle hardware which is older than Vegas.
 
I have used CHDMAN for all kinds of cloning/image copying and have had good results. You might want to just take the image and transfer it to a CF card, that's what I have done with my Rush's and Megatough MAXX drives.
 
I have used CHDMAN for all kinds of cloning/image copying and have had good results. You might want to just take the image and transfer it to a CF card, that's what I have done with my Rush's and Megatough MAXX drives.

I considered doing just that but I was told that Vegas HW sometimes doesn't place nice with CF card readers... and frankly, I didn't want to spend a bunch of dough on something that might not work. I have a brand new still in bag 80GB drive here ... I figured that would be the "cheapest" way to go.

:)
 
Damn... i just thought of something. I don't have a box that uses IDE any longer. All my PC's use SATA...

:(
 
BootItNextGeneration (now called BootItBareMetal). Tiny app fits on a floppy or thumb drive, only a couple MB in size with DOS GUI that allows you to do bit by bit cloning of any drive at the sector level ignoring file systems/etc.. www.terabyteunlimited.com.

Will not work with any system that hashes the serial number of the device into the data of course. The data will be the same but not match the hardware.

+1

Edit: Never mind. Obviously I hadn't read down further...

Tom
 
winhex works well with newer PCs with windows7, does a bit by bit clone as long as there are no bad sectors on the disk.

CHDMAN is good if you are using windowsXP, the newest version is kinda of a pain that runs in windows7. Older versions dont see physicaldrives higher then 3 or 4 i think. so if you try to connect your IDE drive using a IDE to USB since you have a SATA motherboard it might make the drive physicaldrive7 or something and chdman wont see it.

The main thing to look at when cloning an arcade harddrive is the size of the drive. Most of the CHDs in the mame set are from original drives which is best. If you have a drive that someone else made it kinda sux for you.
example:
The Cart Fury original drive may be a 10GB or less drive but you have a drive someone else made thats a 40gb drive. You dump the drive with chdman and you get a CHD from a 40GB drive , doesnt matter that only 8GB of the drive was used. Then when you try to image say a 8Gb CF or 16GB Cf it wont work since the file is from a 40GB drive it tries to fill the extra empty space and crashes.
Now some older games that dont use partitions (vegas games dont), you can take the new CHD image and edit it in a hex editor and remove the empty space at the end and you may get it down to a manageable size that works if you do it right. I've been hit or miss on this.

SOOOO, best bet is to get the MAME CHD and hope its from the original HD (I've ran into a couple that were not but from larger replacements), then make one from it, or hope that you have an original drive with no bad sectors if your trying to keep some high scores. just my 2 cents....
 
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