Hard drive replacements - what works and what doesn't

TerryMasters

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Hard drive replacements - what works and what doesn't

I believe teckkev is having trouble getting his Sportstation working using CF cards, and as luck would have it, I'm having trouble getting mine to work with regular hard drives. I think we need a thread dedicated to what does work and what doesn't, both in methods and in physical media.

I don't know why, but I can't even get the original backup I made to work with the original hard drive I have. So far, I've tried two methods:

1.) chdman -extract filename.chd \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE(x)

and

2.) a) chdman -extract filename.chd filename.raw, then doing b) dd if=filename.raw of=/dev/hd(x)

and neither of them worked for me. I also tried doing these same methods on a 20GB Maxtor and a 40GB WD with no luck. Messing with the jumper settings on the drives didn't do much either. The digital LED on the game board always reads, "d" after the initial power up test.

I seem to be at a total loss. I don't have the CF card adapter, nor a CF card atm so I can't try those yet. I know a few people here have made their own drives, if they read this, how did you make your drive, and what media did you use?
 
CF issue has me aggervated. I know (read) others who have done it for sportstation. Also, for normal HD's, turn off test on start (dip 7 or 8). I had prob with real HD until I hit that dip.

Kevin
 
Some Info here on this...

Compact Flash as an Alternative to Hard Drives in Arcade Games

http://www.multigame.com/CF.html


KLOV Thread

http://forums.klov.com/showthread.php?t=23279


Title: HOW TO: Use a compactflash card to replace an arcade hard drive

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?action=printpage;topic=82733.0


At one time I thought a ROM or two needed changing when moving to a CF on some boards, but I could be wrong. I wonder also, as Hard Drives have a certain "geomitry", as in some older computers coulf only see a xx sized drive, if your using a bigger card than the board can "see", you might be running into that issue as well.

-Mike
 
IMO, the only logical explanation as to why my original drive wouldn't work is the flaky chdman. I've read on a few forums that chdman has had issues where people had to rewrite their drives several times before getting a working drive, which is downright ridiculous. Now I don't even know if the backup I made of my drive is valid - if chdman can't write to a drive properly, how am I supposed to believe it can read from one?

If you think about it, it all should have been simple. Backup the drive, try a new image, restore the drive - all simple commands and yet the original drive still refuses to work. There's no other explanation...

Words cannot describe how aggravated I am right now.
 
I know about CF.. I have several installed.. sportstation is the issue.

Kevin


Some Info here on this...

Compact Flash as an Alternative to Hard Drives in Arcade Games

http://www.multigame.com/CF.html


KLOV Thread

http://forums.klov.com/showthread.php?t=23279


Title: HOW TO: Use a compactflash card to replace an arcade hard drive

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?action=printpage;topic=82733.0


At one time I thought a ROM or two needed changing when moving to a CF on some boards, but I could be wrong. I wonder also, as Hard Drives have a certain "geomitry", as in some older computers coulf only see a xx sized drive, if your using a bigger card than the board can "see", you might be running into that issue as well.

-Mike
 
Easy way to test that is MAME.... it will tell you if the CRC is bad..... audit it... you will need the roms but those are usually easy to find...

and

chdman -verify filename.chd

-Mike


IMO, the only logical explanation as to why my original drive wouldn't work is the flaky chdman. I've read on a few forums that chdman has had issues where people had to rewrite their drives several times before getting a working drive, which is downright ridiculous. Now I don't even know if the backup I made of my drive is valid - if chdman can't write to a drive properly, how am I supposed to believe it can read from one?

If you think about it, it all should have been simple. Backup the drive, try a new image, restore the drive - all simple commands and yet the original drive still refuses to work. There's no other explanation...

Words cannot describe how aggravated I am right now.
 
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