Other Reviewing a pile of disks

B

balanga

Over the years I've managed to accummulate around 30 laptop disks and would like identify and possibly backup and reuse some of them. Many are from my pre FreeBSD days. It is difficult to analyse what is on some of them but hopefully someone may be able identify what is on them and copy information from them.

The oldest I have with me is from Jan 1998
diskinfo -v /dev/da1:-
Code: 
/dev/da1
    512             # sectorsize
    4099866624      # mediasize in bytes (3.8G)
    8007552         # mediasize in sectors
    0               # stripesize
    0               # stripeoffset
    498             # Cylinders according to firmware.
    255             # Heads according to firmware.
    63              # Sectors according to firmware.
    IBM-DTCA -24090    # Disk descr.
    D4CA52409022    # Disk ident.
    umass-sim1      # Attachment
    No              # TRIM/UNMAP support
    Unknown         # Rotation rate in RPM
    Not_Zoned       # Zone Mode

gpart show da1:
Code: 
=>     63  8007489  da1  MBR  (3.8G)
       63     8001       - free -  (3.9M)
     8064  7467264    2  ntfs  (3.6G)
  7475328   516096    3  ebr  (252M)
  7991424     8064    1  !10  [active]  (3.9M)
  7999488     8064       - free -  (3.9M)
I can't even remember what EBR means. Can I mount this !10 partition ?

smartctl -a /dev/da1

Code: 
smartctl 7.5 2025-04-30 r5714 [FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-25, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     IBM Travelstar 4GT
Device Model:     IBM-DTCA-24090
Serial Number:    K30K3FG3091
Firmware Version: TC6OAB1A
User Capacity:    4,099,866,624 bytes [4.09 GB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Device is:        In smartctl database 7.5/5706
ATA Version is:   ATA-3 X3T10/2008D revision 1
Local Time is:    Thu Apr 16 20:52:28 2026 CEST
SMART support is: Ambiguous - ATA IDENTIFY DEVICE words 85-87 don't show if SMART is enabled.
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.
 
It doesn't look like massive space. How about imaging all primary devices like /dev/da0 to a central storage with dd? A compressed ZFS pool or just gzipped images to save space, maybe?
 
What is this disk? Probably from an older IBM or Lenovo laptop. I don't know whether Apple MacBooks ever shipped with IBM disks. The 4G size dovetails with you saying that it was from 98 (it's actually pretty big for that age).

It seems to be a Windows disk. The EBR partition is probably an OS recovery setup, containing the install images.

My advice: Either forget about it, because any data on it is now over 20 years old. Or, as MG said, just copy the whole disk using dd (not the partitions, the whole disk), compress the result, and save it somewhere on a permanent server. Also save whatever hardware information you can find, such as the output from gpart and smartctl. You can always analyze it later, or recreate it.
 
MG said:
It doesn't look like massive space. How about imaging all primary devices like /dev/da0 to a central storage with dd? A compressed ZFS pool or just gzipped images to save space, maybe?
Click to expand...
I would like to know what is on it first, but copying to central storage is a good idea.
 
ralphbsz said:
What is this disk? Probably from an older IBM or Lenovo laptop. I don't know whether Apple MacBooks ever shipped with IBM disks. The 4G size dovetails with you saying that it was from 98 (it's actually pretty big for that age).

It seems to be a Windows disk. The EBR partition is probably an OS recovery setup, containing the install images.

My advice: Either forget about it, because any data on it is now over 20 years old. Or, as MG said, just copy the whole disk using dd (not the partitions, the whole disk), compress the result, and save it somewhere on a permanent server. Also save whatever hardware information you can find, such as the output from gpart and smartctl. You can always analyze it later, or recreate it.
Click to expand...
It was actually really big for that time. I probably had it in a Thinkpad 760, but can't remember. It may well have OS/2 installed since that is what I was mainly using at the time.
 
balanga said:
It was actually really big for that time. I probably had it in a Thinkpad 760, but can't remember. It may well have OS/2 installed since that is what I was mainly using at the time.
Click to expand...
It was a weird hype. afaik. I remember all PC stores were full of it but the mouse click interface was so different than WFW3.11 that nobody got it.
CP/M what it seems to be derived from wasn't that bad for the time, though. It runs on my old Z80 Amstrad. Not worse than the DOS systems.
 
Alain De Vos said:
For 4G disks have there place in museum.
Click to expand...
You are showing your age. My first computer had a wapping 100 MB disk.
1776373835255.png
 
MG said:
It doesn't look like massive space. How about imaging all primary devices like /dev/da0 to a central storage with dd? A compressed ZFS pool or just gzipped images to save space, maybe?
Click to expand...
... but first I would update the firmware version from "TC6OAB1A" to at least "TC6OAB2F", for speeding up dd. But before dd, he must be responsible, and check the content with an original copy of Dr Solomon Anti-Virus Toolkit, for avoiding to resurrect from hibernation the worm ILOVEYOU
:)
 
OpenFreeNet said:
... but first I would update the firmware version from "TC6OAB1A" to at least "TC6OAB2F", for speeding up dd. But before dd, he must be responsible, and check the content with an original copy of Dr Solomon Anti-Virus Toolkit, for avoiding to resurrect from hibernation the worm ILOVEYOU
:)
Click to expand...
How do you update the firmware and can you do it from FreeBSD.
I guess I should see if the firmware on my other disks needs updating. Never thought of doing something like that.
 
OpenFreeNet said:
... but first I would update the firmware version from "TC6OAB1A" to at least "TC6OAB2F", for speeding up dd. But before dd, he must be responsible, and check the content with an original copy of Dr Solomon Anti-Virus Toolkit, for avoiding to resurrect from hibernation the worm ILOVEYOU
:)
Click to expand...
How do you update a disk firmware? I thought it was ROM.
Iloveyou was a vbscript worm as I remember. That only works until early WinXP,
 
we would use file -s /dev/da1* on the partitions to see what magic numbers are on them, take the image, and then mdconfig the image as readonly and try and mount stuff that way.
 
balanga said:
How do you update the firmware and can you do it from FreeBSD.
I guess I should see if the firmware on my other disks needs updating. Never thought of doing something like that.
Click to expand...
Regarding the old HDD I were clearly joking.

Regarding modern HDD and SDD, I updated only the firmware of a mine Samsung SSD using the utility of Samsung, but I don't remember the details. Probably an ISO image.

Sometime I update the BIOS and other firmware of my computers. It depends from the vendor of the computer, but if I'm lucky, it is a procedure that can start from the BIOS menu, and it reads the data from the USB disk.
 
balanga said:
gpart show da1:
Code: 
=>     63  8007489  da1  MBR  (3.8G)
       63     8001       - free -  (3.9M)
     8064  7467264    2  ntfs  (3.6G)
  7475328   516096    3  ebr  (252M)
  7991424     8064    1  !10  [active]  (3.9M)
  7999488     8064       - free -  (3.9M)
I can't even remember what EBR means. Can I mount this !10 partition ?
Click to expand...

Well, it says ntfs and likely actually contains an ntfs. What are you waiting for?

Ignore small additional partitions on Windows disks.
 
See EBR as 5,6,7,8 partition ; when MBR only has 1,2,3,4 partition
Normally you can mount it as NTFS

Note,
my windows disk contains,
- 100 MB EFI
- 16 MB Microsoft reserved partition
- 500 GB NTFS basic data partition
- 800 MB NTFS
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top