Filecore-formatted HD into Pi?

Hi,

Is there any way of getting RISC OS formatted IDE hard discs safely across onto the Pi? I’m thinking a ‘known working’ USB→IDE convertor if possible (though any other suggestions are welcome).

I do have a Windows 7 PC I can use as an intermediary (with P-ATA if I recall).

Suggestions welcome!

Sounds like a job for CloneDisc

patric: how would CloneDisc help?

Not my experience, unfortunately. The first one I bought didn’t work. The second did.

http://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/1965

Any suggestions of devices which someone has already used and definitely work? We have a local Maplins, or Amazon would be fine.

Sorry didn’t realize this was a hardware question. Why not buy from CJE et al. Prices seem ok enough and they could test it before selling to you. Unfortunately buying adapters that work on one device for use with others isn’t always a safe bet it seem.

OK – alternative thoughts:

1) Can RPCEmu read filecore-formatted HDs? Would attaching the drive to Windows allow me to access it through RPCEmu?

2) IIRC Linux recognises Filecore-formatted discs. If I use an Ubuntu Livedisc on the Windows machine and temporarily place the disc onto the ATA interface, is there a way to get the data safely off and onto the Pi (/safe/ meaning preserving file formats, not mangling names etc)? ie. is there a quick and easy way to share the drive over the network to the Pi, or would zipping the files and putting them onto USB do it?

Is the disc connected at the moment to a RISC OS machine that works? If so, how about transferring the files via the network?

Have you seen this?

Dave: In brief: Depends upon what you define as ‘works’. Ethernet was not working (generating an interface error on OS start – suggesting fairly significant startup issue (presumably some sort of failure when the podule initialises, as a result absolutely unable to resolve or obtain DHCP address), and I cannot find the quadrature mouse (so used a USB mouse with Unipod to get this far). Initially I thought this may be CMOS corruption having been down for a while. Unfortunately my answer to that (doing a delete power on) resulted in now being unable to use the USB mouse. So now I instead have a machine with no mouse (but no ethernet interface error on startup) – meaning I’ll need a mouse and fingers crossed on the ethernet. I may be able to source a mouse (fingers crossed) but if there was a quicker and easier route that didn’t involve a combination of rooting in the darkest corners of the loft and still requiring prayer then that would be preferable!

It looks like you have two possible ways forward: one is the method Patric linked to, the other is to get the old machine reconfigured. Which you regard as plan A and which as plan B is of course your choice.

The old machine is probably only a few keystrokes away from working correctly – although I don’t know what they are. First is to tell it to use a USB mouse again. Does anyone know what you type into the command line to do that? (Something beginning with *mousetype, perhaps?)

Once you’ve got the mouse going, configuring the network interface should be easy too. If you can get DHCP going again, all well and good; if you can’t, a fixed address is just as easy, on condition you can tell us about the addresses used by at least one other machine on your LAN. So don’t lose heart, you probably don’t need to take it apart!

Dave: It was the whole interface not working – I had tried both DHCP and fixed addresses without joy. *ping from localhost failed. The other disconcerting feature was that one of the *commands from Ethernet suggested it had failed its POST. Interestingly since the error had gone following CMOS reset (hence my guess it was CMOS-related) but I’ve replaced one problem (no view of the outside world) with another (no mouse!) with no definitive knowledge the first issue has gone away.

The real issue is that my only intent was to pull the data. There comes the awful point though when you realise your objective is primarily to play SF3000 again, Magic Pockets via RPCEmu if possible and to have access to some 26-bit applications for reference purposes that there is going to be a lot of effort and trial and error involved for relatively little benefit.

So the purpose of the thread was really to make sure I had excluded relatively pain-free solutions before embarking on a major project!

I don’t think there’s a RISC OS port of RPCEmu (or Arculator), but there is a RISC OS port of ArcEm.

So having weighed up the options – I chose the ‘go into the loft’ option.

Result – one quadrature mouse retrieved. I’m pleased to say that the ethernet interface was quite happy following its delete power on, and immediately showed up on the RPi. I’m leaving it to do its copy operation now.

In answer to David’s question: I should perhaps have made it clear that I can’t run RPCEmu on the Pi, but once the data is on there, I can of course then share it with the PC very easily.