How to format disk for ADFS

I am trying to create a replacement ADFS HardDisk4 for a RiscPC whose boot drive has died.
The dead disk is fully backed up and I have a spare old hard drive.
I have attached the replacement hard drive to an ARMX6, formatted it as bootable with !HForm and copied the backed up data including !Boot to it.

When the replacement drive is put into the RiscPC and the machine is powered on, it gives a disk error 21 message.

Has the disk been formatted for SCSI not ADFS – HForm did not offer a choice but showed the drive as SCSI:5
If this is the case how would I go about creating a suitable ADFS format disk, given that my working RISC OS machines are SCSI based?

What OS ROMs are in the RiscPC? Remember 3.7 can’t deal with new format ADFS.

What OS ROMs are in the RiscPC?

With no hard disk present it reports:

RISC OS 4.39(29 April 2004)
StrongArm
RISC OS Adjust 1i2
RISC OS ADFS

With the same problem on my Risc PC with 4.39 I was using an old HForm from Floppy and format the HDD on Risc PC…
Then I copy the files back, also by using an ARMX6.

I think you must use an old version of HForm to format the drive. Newer versions format in a way that 4.02 cannot understand. Unfortunately HForm doesn’t offer a choice of formatting it the older way.

I think you must use an old version of HForm to format the drive. Newer versions format in a way that 4.02 cannot understand.

It looks as if ROL put some magic into the 4.39 ROMs
The RiscPC is back up and running and everything seems to be the way it was before the crash.
I tried to use the RiscPC and although it would boot up into the desktop via the ROMs I could not get the floppy disk reader to work.
So I plugged the target hard drive via a USB to IDE adapter into a front USB port on the ARMX6 and used HForm from the utilities folder to format it as HardDrive5. Then copied the !Boot and all the backed up stuff from the old RiscPC disk to the new drive.
(the “new” drive is 6 Gig and 20 years old)

I renamed the new disk to HardDrive4 and put it back in the RiscPC.
Amazingly – it booted up, fired out a reminder from !Alarm – to put the blue and green bins out and proceeded to back up via SafeStore to a networked drive.

Glad you got it sorted.

The dead disk is fully backed up …

Now you have it sorted is a more appropriate time to express my first reaction this statement. Nothing is fully backed up until the backup has been restored and tested with none of the original in place.

For that reason, I always remove the disc being backed up and put it in a cupboard. The new copy is then used as the new working disk.