Questions[ide](server)

My department does conversions for people who bought our software to get their data out of their old system and in to our system. Often they will be running odd or archaic systems that the only way to get the data to us is a tape backup.

Currently we have the various OS's installed on several hard drives across several computers. We would like to virtualize this, however many of our tape drives (and we have a lot due to the fact that they can send us anything under the sun) are IDE instead of SCSI. I have successfully in the past done SCSI pass through with VMWare to get SCSI tape drives to work (This was done back in VMWare Server 2), however there was no IDE pass through support at that time.

Due to the long tail of the internet when I attempt to search and see if any of the newer VM products offer IDE pass through I keep getting results from 2007 saying "No you can't do it"

Can any current VM software perform IDE passthough for a tape device? I am willing to accept a Type 1 or Type 2 hypervisor, however a Type2 that supports Windows as the host OS would be preferred.

I have some embedded boards running American Megatrends bios with embedded linux as the OS. The problem I have is that the industrial flash ide's will be corrupted on power loss. I have them formatted as ext4. Whenever this happens, I can usually fix the flash with fsck, but this will not be possible in our deployments. I have heard that disabling the write-caching should help, but I can't figure out how to do it. Also, is there any thing else I should do?

More Info

The drive is a 4gb ide flash module. I have one partition which is ext4. The O.S. is installed on that partition and grub is my bootloader.

fdisk -l shows /dev/sda as my flash module with /dev/sda1 as my primary partition.

After a power loss I usually cannot make it entirely through the boot init scripts.

When I mount the drive on another P.C. I run fsck /dev/sda1. It always shows messages like

"zero datetime on node 1553 ... fix (y)?"

I fix them and it boots fine until the next power loss.

When I get to the office tomorrow, I will post the actual output of fdisk -l

This is all I know about how the system works. I am not a systems guy, I am a Software Engineer that has a habit of getting into predicaments that are outside of his job description. I know how to format drives, install a bootloader, write software, and hack on an operating system.

Here is the output from dumpe2fs

#sudo dumpe2fs /dev/sda1
dumpe2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
Filesystem volume name:   VideoServer
Last mounted on:          /
Filesystem UUID:          9cba62b0-8038-4913-be30-8eb211b23d78
Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53
Filesystem revision #:    1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features:      ext_attr resize_inode dir_index filetype extent flex_bg sparse_super large_file huge_file uninit_bg dir_nlink extra_isize
Filesystem flags:         signed_directory_hash 
Default mount options:    (none)
Filesystem state:         not clean
Errors behavior:          Continue
Filesystem OS type:       Linux
Inode count:              245760
Block count:              977949
Reserved block count:     48896
Free blocks:              158584
Free inodes:              102920
First block:              0
Block size:               4096
Fragment size:            4096
Reserved GDT blocks:      239
Blocks per group:         32768
Fragments per group:      32768
Inodes per group:         8192
Inode blocks per group:   512
Flex block group size:    16
Filesystem created:       Fri Feb  4 15:12:00 2011
Last mount time:          Sun Oct  2 23:48:37 2011
Last write time:          Mon Oct  3 16:34:01 2011
Mount count:              2
Maximum mount count:      26
Last checked:             Tue Oct  4 07:44:50 2011
Check interval:           15552000 (6 months)
Next check after:         Sun Apr  1 07:44:50 2012
Lifetime writes:          21 GB
Reserved blocks uid:      0 (user root)
Reserved blocks gid:      0 (group root)
First inode:              11
Inode size:           256
Required extra isize:     28
Desired extra isize:      28
Default directory hash:   half_md4
Directory Hash Seed:      249d2b79-1e20-49a3-b324-6cb631294a63
Journal backup:           inode blocks

We had an old CNC machine's hard-drive fail recently. The hard-drive is an old 1275MB IDE (Seagate) and there were defiantly bad sectors on it. I was able to image the contents of the drive onto a drive in my computer before it became completely unusable (I used DD, replacing all bad sectors w/ 0s). After running a couple chdsks, the SATA drive will boot off of the image. This is great, but there's one problem. The CNC machine old and requires IDE, I've attempted to copy the currently booting image off of the SATA drive and onto IDE drives numerous times in numerous ways and every time I do so the machines return that a boot device cannot be found.

Some other information:

The file system is fat32, running windows 98  
The SATA drive is an 80gb drive
I have tried copying the image to three 20gb and two 80gb IDE drives  
I have checked the jumper on the back of the IDE drives when using them

If anyone has any ideas, questions, suggestions, etc. please let me know.

P.S. I would just put a fresh install of win98 on the machine if i had the installation media (so that's out of the question). And if it comes to it, this is my last week working here, so I'll leave that to my co-worker.

EDIT: Also, I have tried using Clonezilla as well as straight up DD to copy the image to the IDE drives.

I need to find out if a disk is IDE or SATA (or anything else, maybe). I know that the device is /dev/sda, so I think it's SATA, but I don't know if I can be sure just by the name. I tried looking at dmesg and it always says "SCSI", but I'm sure it's not...

any ideas?

What do you use for temporarily externally mounting 3.5" SATA and IDE hard drives? When I'm in the field and just have a laptop with me, I'd like to be able to mount a client's drive to my laptop for data recovery, etc. Is a separate USB enclosure for SATA and IDE the best option? Any other ideas?