Target Terror - Trying to clone drive to SSD for replacement but game won't boot

CXK

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I've got an IDE hard drive that seems fine but I wanted to get a clone of it on an SSD to replace it. I cloned the drive to the SSD, used an IDE to SATA adapter. The machine boots, it sees the drive as a 240gb ATA drive but the game never gets past the initial post screen, eventually it says "DISK BOOT FAILURE"

I've changed BIOS settings to make that drive the first boot, changed the IDE port on the motherboard to see if that was it. I re-cloned the drive without the SSD trim option to see if that was it. I just can't get the machine to run off of that drive.

More info: I'm running Target Terror Gold 1.38D. I tried to just restore from the a DVD copy I got online (not 100% sure it was actually 1.38D) It would run through the process but it never fully finished or got my new drive to a point where the game worked. I'm hoping to future proof it so I don't get stuck with a fully useless machine.

Any ideas?
 
Never use a "trim" feature, not the first time at least. The only way that works reliably without truncating data is if it reads the filesystem and you don't want that. In fact, if you're doing that then you might be cloning a particular partition and not the whole drive, which could lead to not having a "boot" sector. You need to clone the whole drive.

You can use an Ubuntu USB bootable flash drive and run "dd".

Code:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32M status=progress

If you don't know the "/dev/sda" part, you can use "fdisk -l" to find them. "/dev/sda" would be the drive you want to clone, and "/dev/sdb" would be the new drive you're cloning to.
 
Never use a "trim" feature, not the first time at least. The only way that works reliably without truncating data is if it reads the filesystem and you don't want that. In fact, if you're doing that then you might be cloning a particular partition and not the whole drive, which could lead to not having a "boot" sector. You need to clone the whole drive.

You can use an Ubuntu USB bootable flash drive and run "dd".

Code:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32M status=progress

If you don't know the "/dev/sda" part, you can use "fdisk -l" to find them. "/dev/sda" would be the drive you want to clone, and "/dev/sdb" would be the new drive you're cloning to.
That may be above my skill level lol! I'm kind of surprised no one sells CF drives ready to go for this machine.
 
That may be above my skill level lol! I'm kind of surprised no one sells CF drives ready to go for this machine.
It's a good way to dupe a drive, but if you're not familiar with Linux then it could be dangerous.
Give R-Drive Image a shot first. And remember you're copying an entire drive, not just a single partition.
 
I had 2 Target Terror machines. First one I was able to do a flash drive on it. I could not get the second machine to accept a flash drive no matter what I tried. I gave up and just threw a new regular spinning hard drive in it and called it a day.

It's hard to sell flash drives for that reason. Also, there are so many different versions that were made, it would make it a nightmare for the seller.
 
I had 2 Target Terror machines. First one I was able to do a flash drive on it. I could not get the second machine to accept a flash drive no matter what I tried. I gave up and just threw a new regular spinning hard drive in it and called it a day.

It's hard to sell flash drives for that reason. Also, there are so many different versions that were made, it would make it a nightmare for the seller.
I guess I may be forced to just buy an IDE drive on eBay. I'll try this R-Drive tool first. If not, spinning drive it is.
 
You can use whatever drive you want on it, however just use the restore disk for format the drive.

If you have somewhere for me to put it, I have the 2.12 version.
 
I had 2 Target Terror machines. First one I was able to do a flash drive on it. I could not get the second machine to accept a flash drive no matter what I tried. I gave up and just threw a new regular spinning hard drive in it and called it a day.

It's hard to sell flash drives for that reason. Also, there are so many different versions that were made, it would make it a nightmare for the seller.

Yeah it seems like there are different versions, of the same revision. Some have USB dongles and some have Parallel dongles...

The only way I was able to change the hard drive, was to burn a new SSD with the install discs, but again you run into the problem where you might not have the right version.
 
I can understand why game companies made it so difficult for people to just use a computer and copy there software to make an arcade game but now that we have gotten to the end of service for these machines the copy protection is making it hard to make or replace parts when we try to preserve these devices. Its just fortunate that we have people who are un willing to give up and have found work arounds and have broken some of the protection schemes
 
For driving imaging on Windows I like using HDD Raw Copy Tool by HDD Guru. Simple point and click interface. You would just select your IDE drive from the PC as the source, and your new SSD as the target. It's free as well. https://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/ - It makes a 1:1 copy of the entire drive contents including boot sectors and partition layouts.
 
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