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Patreon Vid: Imaging Nortel Hard Drives (Patreon)

Published:
2026-03-29 18:37:25
Edited:
2026-03-29 18:37:46
Imported:
2026-03

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Content

Trying to image some Nortel hard drives for the BCM1000. Also talking about AS/400 stuff between image write attempts.

Lemme know what I'm doing wrong trying to write that image back!

Files

Imaging some Nortel Hard Drives

Comments

John Bailey

A couple thoughts here. Automount is screwing you on reading the images in with dd. You're right that your image should be the exact size of the disk you're imaging. So 20 GB hard drive should produce a 20 GB mage. If you can't disable automount, you could try to get the system into single user mode (`init 1` as root) and try it from the text console and see if you get the same error. You could also try to use the ddrescue command to take your image. For writing out the image, I'd get rid of the IDE adapter when you're writing to the SD card. Slap it in a regular USB to SD adapter and try to write the image out that way. That should be more reliable, and the IDE adapter should accept the SD card just fine afterward. All that said, as a last resort, if you have an older PC around that has IDE channels, you could try something old like Slackware 7.1's live CD and put both the hard drive and the SD card in the IDE adapter in said PC. I'd recommend jumpering the hard drive as Slave and putting it on the secondary channel with the CD drive and put the SD adapter alone on the primary channel. Once booted into the live CD you can verify that /dev/hda is the SD card with the proper 32 GB size and that /dev/hdd is the hard drive with 20 GB size, then `dd if=/dev/hdd of=/dev/hda bs=512` to copy from the hard drive to the SD card.

vm

Going off of John Bailey's comment, something else you could try is not using GNOME. KDE should avoid the auto-mounting that GNOME has. Also you could use GNOME Disks, to ensure that everything is unmounted properly and even turn the "drive" off before killing power. However, what's probably most likely is that the SD card might have failed. They get into this state where they won't save writes to them, and removing power would produce some weirdness. I'd probably also recommend avoiding using Ubuntu for this, it's relatively decent, but some weird defaults it has might be making backup/restoration of your image iffy as well. Fedora is a safe choice if you want a full OS, but you could also use something like Clonezilla for it too. Additionally, it might not hurt to create a second image using ddrescue

Will G.

I like using ddrescue/gddrescue for imaging a drive of unknown provenance. It will retry sectors and let you resume a failed run if you use a mapfile.

Mark Heneghan

Yep. Lazy man’s way is using FTK imager with an unmounted FS. I watched the AD video last night. There were a few things where I was like, I just need to drive down from Denver and meet you to run over some of these concepts. :)

Alex Munoz

2 hour video, with a 30 minute video 2 days later? Must be christmas :)

Michał Szczepaniak

Proptip, if you wanna make image of block device, you can simply copy it. cp /dev/sda image.img

clabretro

yeah I might try that one too, I've heard good things

clabretro

Oh interesting thought about skipping the IDE adapter when writing!

clabretro

Awesome, thank you! Good point about that SD card maybe failing, I'll try others.

Heino Walther

My guess would be that the Linux automounter kicks in when it sees the first partition... or after x-minutes... which makes sense with the 700MB ish... not sure, but I guess there is an automounter service that can be disabled... and then dd should work... Anyway.. did you try to write the img-file with the superclone app?