Hi,

I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital audio
multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland Service) is
that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format correctly.

It goes through the format process of making 4 10GB partitions but always
fails at the end of it. If you put the failed drive into a PC you can see 4
FAT 32 10G drive icons, so the machine is seeing and writing to the drive.
If you turn on the "physical format" option, the formatting takes about 8
hours, and again fails right at the end. I've tried all jumper combinations
Master/slave etc.

I have an old 80G Maxtor drive that the 2480 WILL format, though it is old
and very noisy. The drive I have bought is a Western Digital 160Gb PATA
drive. (WD1600AAJB)

So is there perhaps a way to fool the 2480 into thinking this is an 80G
drive?

I actually had a similar problem with my Sony Vaio laptop when I tried to
upgrade the 40G drive - the Vaio didn't recognise the large drive properly
and DMA (I think) was not turned on, resulting in extremely slow disk
access. After posting on usenet someone pointed me to an alternative
chipset driver that made the Vaio think it had a SCSI/Raid controller and
the large IDE hard drive then worked perfectly!?!

What is this thing with too large hard drives? Is there any likelyhood of
getting this drive to format?


Sorry for the long post.

Gareth.

Ah, the noisy drive that does format is a 40GB Western Digital WD400, not a
Maxtor.

Could I use this to somehow "clone" the new drive?



Cheers,


Gareth.

Gareth Magennis wrote:
Hi,

I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital audio
multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland Service) is
that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format correctly.

It goes through the format process of making 4 10GB partitions but always
fails at the end of it. If you put the failed drive into a PC you can see 4
FAT 32 10G drive icons, so the machine is seeing and writing to the drive.
If you turn on the "physical format" option, the formatting takes about 8
hours, and again fails right at the end. I've tried all jumper combinations
Master/slave etc.

I have an old 80G Maxtor drive that the 2480 WILL format, though it is old
and very noisy. The drive I have bought is a Western Digital 160Gb PATA
drive. (WD1600AAJB)

So is there perhaps a way to fool the 2480 into thinking this is an 80G
drive?

I actually had a similar problem with my Sony Vaio laptop when I tried to
upgrade the 40G drive - the Vaio didn't recognise the large drive properly
and DMA (I think) was not turned on, resulting in extremely slow disk
access. After posting on usenet someone pointed me to an alternative
chipset driver that made the Vaio think it had a SCSI/Raid controller and
the large IDE hard drive then worked perfectly!?!

What is this thing with too large hard drives? Is there any likelyhood of
getting this drive to format?

Have you tried putting the drive into a PC and building/formatting
your four 10G partitions *there*? IIRC, FAT32 will support up to
~30G so you could try four 30G partitions and losing the remaining
40G on the drive (which should still be better than the original
device *ever* had!).

Larger disks use LBA addressing and can convert the old C/H/S addresses
to this form -- but, only to the extent supported by the CHS scheme!
(thank the morons who saved a few *bits* on these disks (going back to
floppy land) with FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, etc. (gee, aren't disks BIGGER
than "a few bits"??) and gave us all of these compatibility issues...

In article ,
says...
Hi,

I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital audio
multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland Service) is
that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format correctly.

It goes through the format process of making 4 10GB partitions but always
fails at the end of it. If you put the failed drive into a PC you can see 4
FAT 32 10G drive icons, so the machine is seeing and writing to the drive.
If you turn on the "physical format" option, the formatting takes about 8
hours, and again fails right at the end. I've tried all jumper combinations
Master/slave etc.

I have an old 80G Maxtor drive that the 2480 WILL format, though it is old
and very noisy. The drive I have bought is a Western Digital 160Gb PATA
drive. (WD1600AAJB)

So is there perhaps a way to fool the 2480 into thinking this is an 80G
drive?

I actually had a similar problem with my Sony Vaio laptop when I tried to
upgrade the 40G drive - the Vaio didn't recognise the large drive properly
and DMA (I think) was not turned on, resulting in extremely slow disk
access. After posting on usenet someone pointed me to an alternative
chipset driver that made the Vaio think it had a SCSI/Raid controller and
the large IDE hard drive then worked perfectly!?!

What is this thing with too large hard drives? Is there any likelyhood of
getting this drive to format?


Sorry for the long post.

Gareth.

I just used a CF adapter and a 40G CF card to repair an old system that
we have to use with some ancient test equipment.
Not only does it work, it runs FAST.
They are cheap to boot.

On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 10:03:10 -0700, D Yuniskis wrote:

Larger disks use LBA addressing

So do smaller disks, LOL!

LBA is a particularly simple linear addressing scheme; blocks are located
by an integer index, with the first block being LBA 0, the second LBA 1,
and so on.

IDE standard included 22-bit LBA as an option, which was further extended
to 28-bit with the release of ATA-1 (1994) and to 48-bit with the release
of ATA-6 (2003). Most hard drives released after 1996 implement Logical
block addressing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing


--
Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse

On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:42:18 +0000, Gareth Magennis wrote:

Ah, the noisy drive that does format is a 40GB Western Digital WD400,
not a Maxtor.

Could I use this to somehow "clone" the new drive?



Cheers,


Gareth.

Go to google.com and search for - free hd cloning software.



--
Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse

Meat Plow wrote:
On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 10:03:10 -0700, D Yuniskis wrote:

Larger disks use LBA addressing

So do smaller disks, LOL!

Only *some* smaller disks. Older (the OP was talking about "old
systems" -- I guess I take that *literally*) drives expected
the CHS values to conform to the *physical* geometry of the
drive (i.e., before ZDR, etc.). Older INT13 limits trapped
you at ~500MB (I have a selection of ~300MB drives on hand for
just such machines).

Early IDE implementations required the INIT message to provide
the *actual* physical geometry implementation to the drive's
controller. Getting this wrong resulted in a scrambled disk.
(I was "lucky"? enough to be a victim of one of the first IDE
machines ~1986 vintage when the rest of the world was still ST506).

As processing power IN THE DRIVE became affordable, it was possible
for the drive to map arbitrary "virtual" geometries into their
own physical geometry. This allowed you to use any "drive type"
that your BIOS would support -- so long as you never exceeded the
physical capacity of the device. I've modified the ROMs in my
Compaq Portable III and Portable 386 to create bogus drive types
to allow 300M drives to be used in these boxes (this is tricky as
you have to do so without invalidating the ROMs checksum, etc.)
instead of the ~100MB limit imposed by the original drive type
selection.

"Type 47" eventually became synonymous with "user defined geometry"
as BIOS's began to allow these extra parameters to be stored in
"CMOS" (once the 50 byte limitation of the original MC146818 was
ignored). This allowed you to fabricate an arbitrary geometry
for your drive without concern for the "claimed" physical geometry
(since ZDR has made this meaningless) as long as your geometry
fit "within" the drive's capacity.

Nowadays, the drive's capacity is queried (won't work with antique
drives!) and automagically accommodated.

Of course, that's at the lowest level in the drive interface "stack".
You still have to deal with partitions, slices and the individual
requirements of the file systems hosted *on* that drive -- any of
which can also constrain the usable space.

Many OS's still have throwbacks to physical device geometries for
hysterical raisins. E.g., you can't boot a Solaris systems (pre 10?)
if the startup code isn't within the first 2G of the boot partition;
the same is true of many MS OS's (DOS 3.3, IIRC, had a 32M! limit).

Any of these things can be responsible for upsetting the OP's
device. I stand by my initial comment: format the drive on a
PC and then install it in the device. If you are tech savvy,
*wipe* the drive first; then let the device *try* to format it;
then examine the MBR and partition table to see if everything
is *almost* right (it could be that the "problem" lies in writing
the partition table sanely); then, resort to the PC approach

(I've used this sort of tactic to upsize drives in NAS boxes, etc.
beyond "factory supported limits")

LBA is a particularly simple linear addressing scheme; blocks are located
by an integer index, with the first block being LBA 0, the second LBA 1,
and so on.

IDE standard included 22-bit LBA as an option, which was further extended
to 28-bit with the release of ATA-1 (1994) and to 48-bit with the release
of ATA-6 (2003). Most hard drives released after 1996 implement Logical
block addressing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing

"D Yuniskis" wrote in message
...
Meat Plow wrote:
On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 10:03:10 -0700, D Yuniskis wrote:

Larger disks use LBA addressing

So do smaller disks, LOL!

Only *some* smaller disks. Older (the OP was talking about "old
systems" -- I guess I take that *literally*) drives expected
the CHS values to conform to the *physical* geometry of the
drive (i.e., before ZDR, etc.). Older INT13 limits trapped
you at ~500MB (I have a selection of ~300MB drives on hand for
just such machines).

Early IDE implementations required the INIT message to provide
the *actual* physical geometry implementation to the drive's
controller. Getting this wrong resulted in a scrambled disk.
(I was "lucky"? enough to be a victim of one of the first IDE
machines ~1986 vintage when the rest of the world was still ST506).

As processing power IN THE DRIVE became affordable, it was possible
for the drive to map arbitrary "virtual" geometries into their
own physical geometry. This allowed you to use any "drive type"
that your BIOS would support -- so long as you never exceeded the
physical capacity of the device. I've modified the ROMs in my
Compaq Portable III and Portable 386 to create bogus drive types
to allow 300M drives to be used in these boxes (this is tricky as
you have to do so without invalidating the ROMs checksum, etc.)
instead of the ~100MB limit imposed by the original drive type
selection.

"Type 47" eventually became synonymous with "user defined geometry"
as BIOS's began to allow these extra parameters to be stored in
"CMOS" (once the 50 byte limitation of the original MC146818 was
ignored). This allowed you to fabricate an arbitrary geometry
for your drive without concern for the "claimed" physical geometry
(since ZDR has made this meaningless) as long as your geometry
fit "within" the drive's capacity.

Nowadays, the drive's capacity is queried (won't work with antique
drives!) and automagically accommodated.

Of course, that's at the lowest level in the drive interface "stack".
You still have to deal with partitions, slices and the individual
requirements of the file systems hosted *on* that drive -- any of
which can also constrain the usable space.

Many OS's still have throwbacks to physical device geometries for
hysterical raisins. E.g., you can't boot a Solaris systems (pre 10?)
if the startup code isn't within the first 2G of the boot partition;
the same is true of many MS OS's (DOS 3.3, IIRC, had a 32M! limit).

Any of these things can be responsible for upsetting the OP's
device. I stand by my initial comment: format the drive on a
PC and then install it in the device. If you are tech savvy,
*wipe* the drive first; then let the device *try* to format it;
then examine the MBR and partition table to see if everything
is *almost* right (it could be that the "problem" lies in writing
the partition table sanely); then, resort to the PC approach

(I've used this sort of tactic to upsize drives in NAS boxes, etc.
beyond "factory supported limits")

LBA is a particularly simple linear addressing scheme; blocks are located
by an integer index, with the first block being LBA 0, the second LBA 1,
and so on.

IDE standard included 22-bit LBA as an option, which was further extended
to 28-bit with the release of ATA-1 (1994) and to 48-bit with the release
of ATA-6 (2003). Most hard drives released after 1996 implement Logical
block addressing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing






Interesting stuff guys. Thanks.


In this case there is no OS on the disk at all, the 2480 does not boot from
it.
I have successfully upgraded the 2480's OS via MIDI onto its onboard Flash,
with no valid hard drive installed. The drive is purely storage.

Does this make things any easier?
Is cloning the new drive from the working (noisy) one a viable proposition?



Cheers,


Gareth.

Gareth Magennis wrote:

"D Yuniskis" wrote in message
...
Meat Plow wrote:
On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 10:03:10 -0700, D Yuniskis wrote:

Larger disks use LBA addressing

So do smaller disks, LOL!

Only *some* smaller disks. Older (the OP was talking about "old
systems" -- I guess I take that *literally*) drives expected
the CHS values to conform to the *physical* geometry of the
drive (i.e., before ZDR, etc.). Older INT13 limits trapped
you at ~500MB (I have a selection of ~300MB drives on hand for
just such machines).

Early IDE implementations required the INIT message to provide
the *actual* physical geometry implementation to the drive's
controller. Getting this wrong resulted in a scrambled disk.
(I was "lucky"? enough to be a victim of one of the first IDE
machines ~1986 vintage when the rest of the world was still ST506).

As processing power IN THE DRIVE became affordable, it was possible
for the drive to map arbitrary "virtual" geometries into their
own physical geometry. This allowed you to use any "drive type"
that your BIOS would support -- so long as you never exceeded the
physical capacity of the device. I've modified the ROMs in my
Compaq Portable III and Portable 386 to create bogus drive types
to allow 300M drives to be used in these boxes (this is tricky as
you have to do so without invalidating the ROMs checksum, etc.)
instead of the ~100MB limit imposed by the original drive type
selection.

"Type 47" eventually became synonymous with "user defined geometry"
as BIOS's began to allow these extra parameters to be stored in
"CMOS" (once the 50 byte limitation of the original MC146818 was
ignored). This allowed you to fabricate an arbitrary geometry
for your drive without concern for the "claimed" physical geometry
(since ZDR has made this meaningless) as long as your geometry
fit "within" the drive's capacity.

Nowadays, the drive's capacity is queried (won't work with antique
drives!) and automagically accommodated.

Of course, that's at the lowest level in the drive interface "stack".
You still have to deal with partitions, slices and the individual
requirements of the file systems hosted *on* that drive -- any of
which can also constrain the usable space.

Many OS's still have throwbacks to physical device geometries for
hysterical raisins. E.g., you can't boot a Solaris systems (pre 10?)
if the startup code isn't within the first 2G of the boot partition;
the same is true of many MS OS's (DOS 3.3, IIRC, had a 32M! limit).

Any of these things can be responsible for upsetting the OP's
device. I stand by my initial comment: format the drive on a
PC and then install it in the device. If you are tech savvy,
*wipe* the drive first; then let the device *try* to format it;
then examine the MBR and partition table to see if everything
is *almost* right (it could be that the "problem" lies in writing
the partition table sanely); then, resort to the PC approach

(I've used this sort of tactic to upsize drives in NAS boxes, etc.
beyond "factory supported limits")

LBA is a particularly simple linear addressing scheme; blocks are located
by an integer index, with the first block being LBA 0, the second LBA 1,
and so on.

IDE standard included 22-bit LBA as an option, which was further extended
to 28-bit with the release of ATA-1 (1994) and to 48-bit with the release
of ATA-6 (2003). Most hard drives released after 1996 implement Logical
block addressing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing


Interesting stuff guys. Thanks.

In this case there is no OS on the disk at all, the 2480 does not boot from
it.
I have successfully upgraded the 2480's OS via MIDI onto its onboard Flash,
with no valid hard drive installed. The drive is purely storage.


It depends on the BIOS of the computer. That sets the upper limit.


Does this make things any easier?
Is cloning the new drive from the working (noisy) one a viable proposition?

Cheers,

Gareth.




--
Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
enough left over to pay them.

On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:42:55 +0000, Gareth Magennis wrote:


Interesting stuff guys. Thanks.


In this case there is no OS on the disk at all, the 2480 does not boot
from it.
I have successfully upgraded the 2480's OS via MIDI onto its onboard
Flash, with no valid hard drive installed. The drive is purely storage.

Does this make things any easier?
Is cloning the new drive from the working (noisy) one a viable
proposition?



Cheers,


Gareth.


It is viable. Would need to be done in a PC, bit for Bit copy. But I'm
not sure if you need to clone it without me knowing the file system. I
snuck in here late, just what is the equipment. I've spent a couple
decades with digital recorders from Fostex, Otari and DVR recorders from
SA, Samsung and Cisco. The firmware embedded OS isn't a problem but I'd
like to do a little research on what a 2840 is.



--
Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse

"Meat Plow" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:42:55 +0000, Gareth Magennis wrote:


Interesting stuff guys. Thanks.


In this case there is no OS on the disk at all, the 2480 does not boot
from it.
I have successfully upgraded the 2480's OS via MIDI onto its onboard
Flash, with no valid hard drive installed. The drive is purely storage.

Does this make things any easier?
Is cloning the new drive from the working (noisy) one a viable
proposition?



Cheers,


Gareth.


It is viable. Would need to be done in a PC, bit for Bit copy. But I'm
not sure if you need to clone it without me knowing the file system. I
snuck in here late, just what is the equipment. I've spent a couple
decades with digital recorders from Fostex, Otari and DVR recorders from
SA, Samsung and Cisco. The firmware embedded OS isn't a problem but I'd
like to do a little research on what a 2840 is.





http://www.rolandus.com/products/pro...?ProductId=339




Its kinda old in technology terms, but not that old really.



Cheers,


Gareth.

On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 10:03:10 -0700, D Yuniskis
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Have you tried putting the drive into a PC and building/formatting
your four 10G partitions *there*? IIRC, FAT32 will support up to
~30G ...

FAT32 can support drives much larger than that. For example, I'm
running a 120GB drive on a Win98SE box with a FAT32 file system. You
may be thinking of Windows XP's artificial 32GB limit.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 16:09:45 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital audio
multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland Service) is
that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format correctly.

It goes through the format process of making 4 10GB partitions but always
fails at the end of it. If you put the failed drive into a PC you can see 4
FAT 32 10G drive icons, so the machine is seeing and writing to the drive.
If you turn on the "physical format" option, the formatting takes about 8
hours, and again fails right at the end. I've tried all jumper combinations
Master/slave etc.

I have an old 80G Maxtor drive that the 2480 WILL format, though it is old
and very noisy. The drive I have bought is a Western Digital 160Gb PATA
drive. (WD1600AAJB)

So is there perhaps a way to fool the 2480 into thinking this is an 80G
drive?

Perhaps the Roland recorder becomes confused with drives that are
larger than the 28-bit LBA limit, ie 128GiB or 137GB?

If so, then use HDAT2 to truncate the drive by creating a HPA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area
http://www.hdat2.com/
http://www.hdat2.com/hdat2_faq.html

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

Gareth Magennis wrote:

In this case there is no OS on the disk at all, the 2480 does not boot
from it.

Sure, but the code running in the device still has some concept
of what *it* thinks a disk will "look like". Whatever the
prevailing psychosis regarding disks happened to be at the time
the device was manufactured... :

I have successfully upgraded the 2480's OS via MIDI onto its onboard
Flash, with no valid hard drive installed. The drive is purely storage.

Does this make things any easier?

You still have the "what do I think a 'disk' looks like" issue.

If it is just used for storage, do you have to *put* anything on
it, initially? I.e., can the device cope with a "blank" (though
formatted!) disk?

If this is the case, format it as I described (in a PC).

OTOH, if you need to "initialize" it's contents, then you will
want to clone an image off of a "preciously initialized" disk...

Is cloning the new drive from the working (noisy) one a viable proposition?

Yes. "Clonezilla" (et al.) is your friend... You will still
need to do this in a PC -- though you can do it on a PC with the
covers off and your disk(s) (the one being cloned and then the
one you are cloning *to*) dangling from their cables (I have a
small PC that I use for this -- set the drive on top of
the CD-ROM (on top of a pad of paper acting as an insulator)
and "borrow" the cable from the existing disk drive in the PC)

BTW, it probably wouldn't hurt to save a copy of the disk images
that Clonezilla builds for you onto CD or DVD (depending on how
large they actually are) so you have them as a fallback *when*
your disk dies...

"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital
audio multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland
Service) is that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format
correctly.

It goes through the format process of making 4 10GB partitions but always
fails at the end of it. If you put the failed drive into a PC you can see
4 FAT 32 10G drive icons, so the machine is seeing and writing to the
drive. If you turn on the "physical format" option, the formatting takes
about 8 hours, and again fails right at the end. I've tried all jumper
combinations Master/slave etc.

I have an old 80G Maxtor drive that the 2480 WILL format, though it is old
and very noisy. The drive I have bought is a Western Digital 160Gb PATA
drive. (WD1600AAJB)


You will likely need a slightly smaller drive. The old addressing system was
only good to 127GB, so the largest you can likely use is a 120GB drive.

"Franc Zabkar" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 10:03:10 -0700, D Yuniskis
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Have you tried putting the drive into a PC and building/formatting
your four 10G partitions *there*? IIRC, FAT32 will support up to
~30G ...

FAT32 can support drives much larger than that. For example, I'm
running a 120GB drive on a Win98SE box with a FAT32 file system. You
may be thinking of Windows XP's artificial 32GB limit.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.




I may have made a mistake on that, it might be FAT 16. ? I'm not able to
verify that right now.

Anyway it is some kind of FAT system that my WinXP desktop recognises.


Having said that, I have looked at forums regarding drives for this unit and
it does seem you need at least a 10mSec access drive for reliability. It
needs to read and write up to 24 tracks of audio.
Would Roland have tried to supercharge (rather than reinvent) the wheel
here, or would they take off the shelf IDE drives and use bog standard
library software to write and read to it?

My new WD drive average is specified below this figure, though its absolute
max seek time is a quoted 20mSec. I wasn't able to clearly establish
what this forum quoted minimum 10mSecs actually means - average or absolute
maximum.

Maybe this is an issue?




Cheers,


Gareth.

"D Yuniskis" wrote in message
...
Gareth Magennis wrote:

In this case there is no OS on the disk at all, the 2480 does not boot
from it.

Sure, but the code running in the device still has some concept
of what *it* thinks a disk will "look like". Whatever the
prevailing psychosis regarding disks happened to be at the time
the device was manufactured... :

I have successfully upgraded the 2480's OS via MIDI onto its onboard
Flash, with no valid hard drive installed. The drive is purely storage.

Does this make things any easier?

You still have the "what do I think a 'disk' looks like" issue.

If it is just used for storage, do you have to *put* anything on
it, initially? I.e., can the device cope with a "blank" (though
formatted!) disk?

If this is the case, format it as I described (in a PC).

OTOH, if you need to "initialize" it's contents, then you will
want to clone an image off of a "preciously initialized" disk...

Is cloning the new drive from the working (noisy) one a viable
proposition?

Yes. "Clonezilla" (et al.) is your friend... You will still
need to do this in a PC -- though you can do it on a PC with the
covers off and your disk(s) (the one being cloned and then the
one you are cloning *to*) dangling from their cables (I have a
small PC that I use for this -- set the drive on top of
the CD-ROM (on top of a pad of paper acting as an insulator)
and "borrow" the cable from the existing disk drive in the PC)

BTW, it probably wouldn't hurt to save a copy of the disk images
that Clonezilla builds for you onto CD or DVD (depending on how
large they actually are) so you have them as a fallback *when*
your disk dies...




I will certainly be giving this a go.



Cheers to you and M.P.

Gareth.

On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:05:01 +0000, Gareth Magennis wrote:

"Meat Plow" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:42:55 +0000, Gareth Magennis wrote:


Interesting stuff guys. Thanks.


In this case there is no OS on the disk at all, the 2480 does not boot
from it.
I have successfully upgraded the 2480's OS via MIDI onto its onboard
Flash, with no valid hard drive installed. The drive is purely
storage.

Does this make things any easier?
Is cloning the new drive from the working (noisy) one a viable
proposition?



Cheers,


Gareth.


It is viable. Would need to be done in a PC, bit for Bit copy. But I'm
not sure if you need to clone it without me knowing the file system. I
snuck in here late, just what is the equipment. I've spent a couple
decades with digital recorders from Fostex, Otari and DVR recorders
from SA, Samsung and Cisco. The firmware embedded OS isn't a problem
but I'd like to do a little research on what a 2840 is.





http://www.rolandus.com/products/pro...?ProductId=339




Its kinda old in technology terms, but not that old really.



Cheers,


Gareth.

Have you contacted Roland support? That would be the first thing I would
do. Obviously there is content on the noisy hard drive you wish to
transfer and I am certain this is not a unique situation that Roland/Boss
would have support for.

--
Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse

Franc Zabkar wrote:
On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 10:03:10 -0700, D Yuniskis
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Have you tried putting the drive into a PC and building/formatting
your four 10G partitions *there*? IIRC, FAT32 will support up to
~30G ...

FAT32 can support drives much larger than that. For example, I'm
running a 120GB drive on a Win98SE box with a FAT32 file system. You
may be thinking of Windows XP's artificial 32GB limit.

Sorry, I was actually thinking of the 32*M* limit imposed earlier...

"Meat Plow" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:05:01 +0000, Gareth Magennis wrote:

"Meat Plow" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:42:55 +0000, Gareth Magennis wrote:


Interesting stuff guys. Thanks.


In this case there is no OS on the disk at all, the 2480 does not boot
from it.
I have successfully upgraded the 2480's OS via MIDI onto its onboard
Flash, with no valid hard drive installed. The drive is purely
storage.

Does this make things any easier?
Is cloning the new drive from the working (noisy) one a viable
proposition?



Cheers,


Gareth.


It is viable. Would need to be done in a PC, bit for Bit copy. But I'm
not sure if you need to clone it without me knowing the file system. I
snuck in here late, just what is the equipment. I've spent a couple
decades with digital recorders from Fostex, Otari and DVR recorders
from SA, Samsung and Cisco. The firmware embedded OS isn't a problem
but I'd like to do a little research on what a 2840 is.





http://www.rolandus.com/products/pro...?ProductId=339




Its kinda old in technology terms, but not that old really.



Cheers,


Gareth.

Have you contacted Roland support? That would be the first thing I would
do. Obviously there is content on the noisy hard drive you wish to
transfer and I am certain this is not a unique situation that Roland/Boss
would have support for.

--



I am in regular contact with the Roland Service Dept. UK. They do not have
a specific solution, though are very helpful. This is, after all, an
obsolete piece of equipment, designed for a 40Gb hard drive, that worked
very well. Shame you can't buy the drives any more.

It would be rather neat, though, to find a working solution!



Gareth.

Gareth Magennis wrote:

"Meat Plow" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:05:01 +0000, Gareth Magennis wrote:

"Meat Plow" wrote in message
news On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:42:55 +0000, Gareth Magennis wrote:


Interesting stuff guys. Thanks.


In this case there is no OS on the disk at all, the 2480 does not boot
from it.
I have successfully upgraded the 2480's OS via MIDI onto its onboard
Flash, with no valid hard drive installed. The drive is purely
storage.

Does this make things any easier?
Is cloning the new drive from the working (noisy) one a viable
proposition?



Cheers,


Gareth.


It is viable. Would need to be done in a PC, bit for Bit copy. But I'm
not sure if you need to clone it without me knowing the file system. I
snuck in here late, just what is the equipment. I've spent a couple
decades with digital recorders from Fostex, Otari and DVR recorders
from SA, Samsung and Cisco. The firmware embedded OS isn't a problem
but I'd like to do a little research on what a 2840 is.





http://www.rolandus.com/products/pro...?ProductId=339




Its kinda old in technology terms, but not that old really.



Cheers,


Gareth.

Have you contacted Roland support? That would be the first thing I would
do. Obviously there is content on the noisy hard drive you wish to
transfer and I am certain this is not a unique situation that Roland/Boss
would have support for.

--

I am in regular contact with the Roland Service Dept. UK. They do not have
a specific solution, though are very helpful. This is, after all, an
obsolete piece of equipment, designed for a 40Gb hard drive, that worked
very well. Shame you can't buy the drives any more.


How about Ebay or an 'overstuffed' computer store?

--
Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
enough left over to pay them.

In article ,
Gareth Magennis wrote:

I am in regular contact with the Roland Service Dept. UK. They do not have
a specific solution, though are very helpful. This is, after all, an
obsolete piece of equipment, designed for a 40Gb hard drive, that worked
very well. Shame you can't buy the drives any more.

It would be rather neat, though, to find a working solution!

First possibility: look around for somebody who has a laptop with
a 40-gigabyte 2.5" IDE drive in it. Laptop drives of this size were
fairly common just a couple of years ago, and you may be able to find
one which is still in reasonable working condition. You'd need a new
mounting bracket of some sort (or just double-sided foam tape) and a
small adapter to connect it to a 3.5" drive IDE cable, but it should
work just fine, and its performance will probably be as good or better
than the older 40-gig 3.5" drive that has failed. If you offered the
owner of such a drive a fresh 160-gig 2.5" drive as an even exchange
(that seems to be about the smallest you can buy off-the-shelf these
days) you could probably arrange a deal.

Second possibility: buy an IDE-interface 2.5" solid-state drive...
they're available in 32- and 64-gig capacity these days. Same
physical arrangements as above... mounting arrangement and adapter
cable.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

Dave Platt wrote:

In article ,
Gareth Magennis wrote:

I am in regular contact with the Roland Service Dept. UK. They do not have
a specific solution, though are very helpful. This is, after all, an
obsolete piece of equipment, designed for a 40Gb hard drive, that worked
very well. Shame you can't buy the drives any more.

It would be rather neat, though, to find a working solution!

First possibility: look around for somebody who has a laptop with
a 40-gigabyte 2.5" IDE drive in it. Laptop drives of this size were
fairly common just a couple of years ago, and you may be able to find
one which is still in reasonable working condition. You'd need a new
mounting bracket of some sort (or just double-sided foam tape) and a
small adapter to connect it to a 3.5" drive IDE cable, but it should
work just fine, and its performance will probably be as good or better
than the older 40-gig 3.5" drive that has failed. If you offered the
owner of such a drive a fresh 160-gig 2.5" drive as an even exchange
(that seems to be about the smallest you can buy off-the-shelf these
days) you could probably arrange a deal.

Second possibility: buy an IDE-interface 2.5" solid-state drive...
they're available in 32- and 64-gig capacity these days. Same
physical arrangements as above... mounting arrangement and adapter
cable.


Some 40 & 80 GB recertifed drives he

http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=HDD


--
Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
enough left over to pay them.

snip


I am in regular contact with the Roland Service Dept. UK. They do not
have a specific solution, though are very helpful. This is, after all, an
obsolete piece of equipment, designed for a 40Gb hard drive, that worked
very well. Shame you can't buy the drives any more.

It would be rather neat, though, to find a working solution!



Gareth.

Interestingly, I needed a 40GB HDD just last week to repair a Fostex
multitracker. Like you, I was struggling to find one until a friend of mine
who runs a computer repair shop, pointed me at a local computer recycler
that he knew. He had 40GB drives "coming out of his ears" was his exact
phrase, and was only too happy to let me relieve him of one for free. My
computer repair mate said that he usually had them stacked up as well, left
over from upgrades, and would have been able to help me had he not just had
a big clear-out a few days before !

Any computer repair shops or recycling agencies in your area that you could
try, Gareth ?

Arfa

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 16:09:45 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital audio
multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland Service) is
that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format correctly.

You ought to be able to get small drives very cheaply. Figure out how
msall you need, and if necessary but a whole computer for 10 dollars
and take the drive out. But there are places online selling the size
you need, either somewhat used or maybe even never sold, NIB, new in
box.

You can search on ebay for example, and then save your search and have
them email you every time something that meets your search criteria is
listed. I've been looking for some obscure things for 3 years,
finding them once in a while, but HDDs aren't obscure,

My other idea is to format the drive when it's not in the Roland. Use
a computer to do it and make it no bigger than Roland wants. Just one
partition, unless Roland allows more.

It goes through the format process of making 4 10GB partitions but always
fails at the end of it. If you put the failed drive into a PC you can see 4
FAT 32 10G drive icons, so the machine is seeing and writing to the drive.
If you turn on the "physical format" option, the formatting takes about 8
hours, and again fails right at the end.

And do the formatting with a computer too, not the Roland. AT least
if it fails, you'll get a better message and might be able to use hd
software to learn why it failed. Run chkdsk or scandisk first to get
rid of bad sectors.

And to connect to the computer, buy a Roswill RCW618, for 20 dollars
including shipping at Newegg.com . It connects almost anything but a
zip drive or floppy drive to a USB port, so it will have many uses.

I've tried all jumper combinations
Master/slave etc.

I have an old 80G Maxtor drive that the 2480 WILL format, though it is old
and very noisy. The drive I have bought is a Western Digital 160Gb PATA
drive. (WD1600AAJB)

So is there perhaps a way to fool the 2480 into thinking this is an 80G
drive?

See above.

I actually had a similar problem with my Sony Vaio laptop when I tried to
upgrade the 40G drive - the Vaio didn't recognise the large drive properly
and DMA (I think) was not turned on, resulting in extremely slow disk
access. After posting on usenet someone pointed me to an alternative
chipset driver that made the Vaio think it had a SCSI/Raid controller and
the large IDE hard drive then worked perfectly!?!

What is this thing with too large hard drives? Is there any likelyhood of
getting this drive to format?


Sorry for the long post.

Gareth.

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 21:56:51 +0000 (UTC), Meat Plow
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Would need to be done in a PC, bit for Bit copy. But I'm
not sure if you need to clone it without me knowing the file system.

A bit-for-bit copy doesn't care about the file system. It's a physical
clone rather than a logical one.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 16:09:45 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital audio
multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland Service) is
that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format correctly.

BTW, big drives make more heat, iiuc, even when they're doing no more
work. Is that true, people?

If so, does your roland provide adquate ventilation for a bigger
drive. What will happen if it doesn't.

Anyhow, a reason to look for an old small drive.

Go to computer swap meets. Call or email your local ham radio club--
they run the computer swap meets, and ask them to put something in
their newsletter saying what you want. The computer guys in the club
probably have loads of small hd's around and don't know what to do
with them.

For most places the next hamfest isn't until spring, but see if you
can pick it up at the guys house or come to one of their meetings if
he goes to the meetings.

To find out where hamfests (swapmeets with licensing exams, etc.) are,
got to www.arrl.com or org and click on hamfests. Put in your
zipcode and 50 miles or so and they will give you the ham radio clubs
that still have hamfests. Some have stopped, not sure of the easiest
way to find them.

Also, do you belong to a computer user group. They're like ham radio
clubs but were started for small computers. There are 3 or 4 clubs
in the Baltimore area. I used to go. They were given free software
which they looked at and then gave away to members, or even
non-members who showed up iirc. They used to answer technical
questions, and I guess I stopped going when I found out about Usenet.

IF you ask nice, they too will put your request in the newsletter.
They may charge for classified ads, or just offer them 5 dollars.
Only about 50% of the ham radio events involve computers and fewer of
the actual members. User groups are 100% computer fans. And they
probably have loads of hardware they've never used.

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 21:42:55 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Is cloning the new drive from the working (noisy) one a viable proposition?

I would think that would be the way to go.

One thing to watch out for is bad sectors. If your "working" drive has
any bads, then you need imaging/cloning software that knows how to
work around bad patches in the media.

ddrescue and dd_rescue are two Linux based utilities that can clone a
drive in multiple passes. They image the easy sectors on the first
pass, and attempt the more difficult ones on subsequent passes. They
can also image a drive in reverse. Reverse imaging effectively
disables look ahead caching.

ddrescue: http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
dd_rescue: http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue

HDClone is a Windows based imager:
http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

Copyr.dma is a DOS based imager that can be used for smaller drives:
http://www.copyr.pl/pliki/copyrE13.zip

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 21:42:55 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

In this case there is no OS on the disk at all, the 2480 does not boot from
it.
I have successfully upgraded the 2480's OS via MIDI onto its onboard Flash,
with no valid hard drive installed. The drive is purely storage.

What do you use for backup?

FWIW, here is a thread where someone needed to retrieve audio data
from an Akai MPC2000 sampler:

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Savvio-...dows/m-p/37618

The file system was a proprietary implementation of FAT16. As in your
case, the MPC2000 used the drive for storage, not booting.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

On 11/4/2010 8:38 PM Franc Zabkar spake thus:

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 21:56:51 +0000 (UTC), Meat Plow
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Would need to be done in a PC, bit for Bit copy. But I'm not sure
if you need to clone it without me knowing the file system.

A bit-for-bit copy doesn't care about the file system. It's a physical
clone rather than a logical one.

.... which should more properly be called a "sector-by-sector" copy. It's
not as if you need to move each bit individually; that's handled
deeeeeep down in the drive's firmware.


--
The fashion in killing has an insouciant, flirty style this spring,
with the flaunting of well-defined muscle, wrapped in flags.

- Comment from an article on Antiwar.com (http://antiwar.com)

On Fri, 5 Nov 2010 07:21:10 +0900 "Brenda Ann"
wrote in Message id:
:



"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital
audio multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland
Service) is that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format
correctly.

It goes through the format process of making 4 10GB partitions but always
fails at the end of it. If you put the failed drive into a PC you can see
4 FAT 32 10G drive icons, so the machine is seeing and writing to the
drive. If you turn on the "physical format" option, the formatting takes
about 8 hours, and again fails right at the end. I've tried all jumper
combinations Master/slave etc.

I have an old 80G Maxtor drive that the 2480 WILL format, though it is old
and very noisy. The drive I have bought is a Western Digital 160Gb PATA
drive. (WD1600AAJB)


You will likely need a slightly smaller drive. The old addressing system was
only good to 127GB, so the largest you can likely use is a 120GB drive.
^^^^^
137GB.

On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:57:27 +0000, Gareth Magennis wrote:

"Meat Plow" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:05:01 +0000, Gareth Magennis wrote:

"Meat Plow" wrote in message
news On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:42:55 +0000, Gareth Magennis wrote:


Interesting stuff guys. Thanks.


In this case there is no OS on the disk at all, the 2480 does not
boot from it.
I have successfully upgraded the 2480's OS via MIDI onto its onboard
Flash, with no valid hard drive installed. The drive is purely
storage.

Does this make things any easier?
Is cloning the new drive from the working (noisy) one a viable
proposition?



Cheers,


Gareth.


It is viable. Would need to be done in a PC, bit for Bit copy. But
I'm not sure if you need to clone it without me knowing the file
system. I snuck in here late, just what is the equipment. I've spent
a couple decades with digital recorders from Fostex, Otari and DVR
recorders from SA, Samsung and Cisco. The firmware embedded OS isn't
a problem but I'd like to do a little research on what a 2840 is.





http://www.rolandus.com/products/pro...?ProductId=339




Its kinda old in technology terms, but not that old really.



Cheers,


Gareth.

Have you contacted Roland support? That would be the first thing I
would do. Obviously there is content on the noisy hard drive you wish
to transfer and I am certain this is not a unique situation that
Roland/Boss would have support for.

--



I am in regular contact with the Roland Service Dept. UK. They do not
have a specific solution, though are very helpful. This is, after all,
an obsolete piece of equipment, designed for a 40Gb hard drive, that
worked very well. Shame you can't buy the drives any more.

It would be rather neat, though, to find a working solution!



Gareth.

Well I'm all for cloning using a PC as long as the cloning software
recognizes the structure of the disk partitioning. Most drives these days
have a size limit jumper if your device's AT bios doesn't recognize
drives greater that 137 GB. Good luck.



--
Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse

JW wrote:
On Fri, 5 Nov 2010 07:21:10 +0900 "Brenda Ann"
wrote in Message id:
:


"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital
audio multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland
Service) is that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format
correctly.

It goes through the format process of making 4 10GB partitions but always
fails at the end of it. If you put the failed drive into a PC you can see
4 FAT 32 10G drive icons, so the machine is seeing and writing to the
drive. If you turn on the "physical format" option, the formatting takes
about 8 hours, and again fails right at the end. I've tried all jumper
combinations Master/slave etc.

I have an old 80G Maxtor drive that the 2480 WILL format, though it is old
and very noisy. The drive I have bought is a Western Digital 160Gb PATA
drive. (WD1600AAJB)

You will likely need a slightly smaller drive. The old addressing system was
only good to 127GB, so the largest you can likely use is a 120GB drive.
^^^^^
137GB.

Depends on whether you count "gigabytes" as a marketing droid
or as an engineer :-/

On Fri, 05 Nov 2010 08:25:26 -0700 D Yuniskis
wrote in Message id: :

JW wrote:
On Fri, 5 Nov 2010 07:21:10 +0900 "Brenda Ann"
wrote in Message id:
:


"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital
audio multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland
Service) is that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format
correctly.

It goes through the format process of making 4 10GB partitions but always
fails at the end of it. If you put the failed drive into a PC you can see
4 FAT 32 10G drive icons, so the machine is seeing and writing to the
drive. If you turn on the "physical format" option, the formatting takes
about 8 hours, and again fails right at the end. I've tried all jumper
combinations Master/slave etc.

I have an old 80G Maxtor drive that the 2480 WILL format, though it is old
and very noisy. The drive I have bought is a Western Digital 160Gb PATA
drive. (WD1600AAJB)

You will likely need a slightly smaller drive. The old addressing system was
only good to 127GB, so the largest you can likely use is a 120GB drive.
^^^^^
137GB.

Depends on whether you count "gigabytes" as a marketing droid
or as an engineer :-/

AFAIK, disk drive manufacturers have as always defined a GB as
1,000,000,000 bytes.

JW wrote:
On Fri, 05 Nov 2010 08:25:26 -0700 D Yuniskis
wrote in Message id: :

JW wrote:
On Fri, 5 Nov 2010 07:21:10 +0900 "Brenda Ann"
wrote in Message id:
:

"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital
audio multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland
Service) is that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format
correctly.

It goes through the format process of making 4 10GB partitions but always
fails at the end of it. If you put the failed drive into a PC you can see
4 FAT 32 10G drive icons, so the machine is seeing and writing to the
drive. If you turn on the "physical format" option, the formatting takes
about 8 hours, and again fails right at the end. I've tried all jumper
combinations Master/slave etc.

I have an old 80G Maxtor drive that the 2480 WILL format, though it is old
and very noisy. The drive I have bought is a Western Digital 160Gb PATA
drive. (WD1600AAJB)

You will likely need a slightly smaller drive. The old addressing system was
only good to 127GB, so the largest you can likely use is a 120GB drive.
^^^^^
137GB.
Depends on whether you count "gigabytes" as a marketing droid
or as an engineer :-/

AFAIK, disk drive manufacturers have as always defined a GB as
1,000,000,000 bytes.

Do you think a kilobyte is 1,000 bytes? And a megabyte is 1,000,000
bytes?

As I said, marketing droids consider it to be 10^9; engineers
consider it to be 2^30. (some folks use GB and GiB to clarify
the distinction when speaking owing to the unwashed masses
blindly following marketing hype)

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...

snip


I am in regular contact with the Roland Service Dept. UK. They do not
have a specific solution, though are very helpful. This is, after all,
an obsolete piece of equipment, designed for a 40Gb hard drive, that
worked very well. Shame you can't buy the drives any more.

It would be rather neat, though, to find a working solution!



Gareth.

Interestingly, I needed a 40GB HDD just last week to repair a Fostex
multitracker. Like you, I was struggling to find one until a friend of
mine who runs a computer repair shop, pointed me at a local computer
recycler that he knew. He had 40GB drives "coming out of his ears" was his
exact phrase, and was only too happy to let me relieve him of one for
free. My computer repair mate said that he usually had them stacked up as
well, left over from upgrades, and would have been able to help me had he
not just had a big clear-out a few days before !

Any computer repair shops or recycling agencies in your area that you
could try, Gareth ?

Arfa


I know I could have gone down that route, but I have an old drive myself
that works, its just that it sounds like an Airbus with a blown engine.
The new drive I bought is very very quiet - part of the reason I bought it.
Don't forget we are talking a digital recorder where it is very likely the
machine will be in the same room as the subject being recorded, so noise is
definitely an issue.

The 2480 is not mine, I am repairing it for a customer. More importantly,
I am hoping to find a generic solution to a generic problem here.

The cloning idea sounds great - you can use any off the shelf drive of any
size and make it look like the original, a perfect solution in my opinion,
as this is (hopefully) always going to work. I am not always going to have
the time or inclination to hunt round computer shops for weird old ****


I'm getting an old PC out tomorrow and trying this cloning malarky.


Thanks,


Gareth.

On Fri, 5 Nov 2010 19:00:06 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

I know I could have gone down that route, but I have an old drive myself
that works, its just that it sounds like an Airbus with a blown engine.
The new drive I bought is very very quiet - part of the reason I bought it.
Don't forget we are talking a digital recorder where it is very likely the
machine will be in the same room as the subject being recorded, so noise is
definitely an issue.

You can make a 1TB drive look like an old 32MB drive. Gigabyte's
Xpress Recovery BIOS has a bug that does just that. :-(

In your case, use HDAT2 to limit the capacity of your drive. It will
then report its reduced size to BIOS and OS, making it
indistinguishable from a smaller drive.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

D Yuniskis wrote:

JW wrote:
On Fri, 05 Nov 2010 08:25:26 -0700 D Yuniskis
wrote in Message id: :

JW wrote:
On Fri, 5 Nov 2010 07:21:10 +0900 "Brenda Ann"
wrote in Message id:
:

"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I'm trying to replace a faulty disk drive on a Roland VS2480 (digital
audio multitrack recorder). The likely problem (according to Roland
Service) is that the new IDE drive is too large for the 2480 to format
correctly.

It goes through the format process of making 4 10GB partitions but always
fails at the end of it. If you put the failed drive into a PC you can see
4 FAT 32 10G drive icons, so the machine is seeing and writing to the
drive. If you turn on the "physical format" option, the formatting takes
about 8 hours, and again fails right at the end. I've tried all jumper
combinations Master/slave etc.

I have an old 80G Maxtor drive that the 2480 WILL format, though it is old
and very noisy. The drive I have bought is a Western Digital 160Gb PATA
drive. (WD1600AAJB)

You will likely need a slightly smaller drive. The old addressing system was
only good to 127GB, so the largest you can likely use is a 120GB drive.
^^^^^
137GB.
Depends on whether you count "gigabytes" as a marketing droid
or as an engineer :-/

AFAIK, disk drive manufacturers have as always defined a GB as
1,000,000,000 bytes.

Do you think a kilobyte is 1,000 bytes? And a megabyte is 1,000,000
bytes?

As I said, marketing droids consider it to be 10^9; engineers
consider it to be 2^30. (some folks use GB and GiB to clarify
the distinction when speaking owing to the unwashed masses
blindly following marketing hype)


10^9 is GigaBull****.


--
Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
enough left over to pay them.

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in message
m...
As I said, marketing droids consider it to be 10^9; engineers
consider it to be 2^30. (some folks use GB and GiB to clarify
the distinction when speaking owing to the unwashed masses
blindly following marketing hype)


10^9 is GigaBull****.


1 KB = 1024 bytes
1 MB = 1024 KB (1048756 bytes)
1 GB = 1024 MB (1073741824 bytes)
1 TB = 1024 GB (1099511627776 bytes)

Brenda Ann wrote:

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in message
m...
As I said, marketing droids consider it to be 10^9; engineers
consider it to be 2^30. (some folks use GB and GiB to clarify
the distinction when speaking owing to the unwashed masses
blindly following marketing hype)


10^9 is GigaBull****.


1 KB = 1024 bytes
1 MB = 1024 KB (1048756 bytes)
1 GB = 1024 MB (1073741824 bytes)
1 TB = 1024 GB (1099511627776 bytes)


Yes, to us electronics types.


--
Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
enough left over to pay them.