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Corrupted HDD Image With Bad SCSI Cable
Posted by: rjkucia on 2022-05-19 06:53:34
Hey all, I've been using a RaSCSI with my SE/30, which worked great until I bought a cheap SCSI cable on Amazon and tried to use it. I apparently upset the SCSI gods and goddesses and now my main boot image won't load. When I try to mount it from another boot disk, it tells me the disk is damaged and needs to be initialized. While I've learned my lesson, ideally I'd like to be able to recover my image in some way so I don't have to start from scratch. Any recommendations on that? I'm not sure exactly what the error message means, like if it's an issue with the files, or the file system itself, and I couldn't find an answer for what to do when that happens. It sounds like normally this means the physical HDD is dying, but of course that's not the case here, since it's just an .hda file.

Thanks in advance!
Posted by: rjkucia on 2022-06-13 16:19:35
I finally got around to playing around with the image in CiderPress, and CiderPress happily opens the image, and the files appear to be fine. So I tried to copy all the files from that image to a fresh one, but that didn't seem to work. I think CiderPress doesn't like it if you try to copy over a ton of files at once. Additionally, it doesn't place the pasted files in the directory they were originally in. For example, I tried just copying over the system folder, which worked, except all the system files were just in the root of the drive. The fastest thing is probably going to end up just starting over from a fresh 7.5.1 image and going from there - unless anyone has suggestions?
Posted by: Byrd on 2022-06-13 16:22:06
I'd start fresh, if you suspect the main OS is corrupt.
Posted by: rjkucia on 2022-06-13 16:32:41
I don't necessarily suspect the OS/system folder - since the volume can't be mounted at all, I think it's just the partition. But I'm not completely sure what the "this disk is damaged and needs to be initialized" error means.
Posted by: rjkucia on 2022-06-28 16:30:48
Okay, phew, it's been a bit of work, but I've figured it out and recovered the drive with no issues. Here's what I did:
  • Installed UTM on my M1 Macbook Air
  • Installed OS X Tiger on that from an image up on the Internet Archive
  • Got that on my network to transfer files via FTP
  • Sent the corrupt image over there, along with a new fresh image
  • Installed Disk Warrior and Data Rescue II on my Tiger system
  • Mounted the fresh image in Finder
  • Used Data Rescue II to pull all the files off of my "bad" image onto the fresh one
  • Used Disk Warrior to "clean up" the new image and bless the System Folder
  • Sent the fresh image back to my RaSCSI
  • Bam, it works. Boots up fine, everything is there.

tl;dr: Old HFS recovery tools are magic, and this would have all been a lot easier if I had a PPC machine on hand 🙂
Posted by: djhaloeight on 2022-06-28 17:06:16
tl;dr: Old HFS recovery tools are magic, and this would have all been a lot easier if I had a PPC machine on hand 🙂

Having a bridge machine as a go-between for older Macs is invaluable 😉
Posted by: rjkucia on 2022-06-30 10:10:13
That would have really helped here! I can see why it's so easy to end up with stockpiles of these things, lol

And if anyone's wondering why I specified that I ran it on UTM on my M1 - I tried it on my Linux server and my Windows PC using QEMU, and it *ran*, but unusably slowly. It worked much, much faster on my Macbook. I'm not sure if it was my settings or if the M1 is just that much faster at this task.

And here's the image I used - https://archive.org/details/mac-osx-tiger-10.4-ppc-installed-qcow2-image
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