One of our Ge F9001E 100MW gas turbine using mark5 simplex control panel with Idos. The hard drive have crashed but the installation diskette was not found to enable us reprogrammed a new 3GB hard drive for the system. although we are using another one from a down gas turbine to operate the unit while effort is being made to fix the bad system. please l need help on how to reprogrammed the new hard drive for the system. The operating system (OS) is DOS version 4.6. Your contribution to this problem shall be highly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

Run to fail...

You may create a image backup from disk imaging software to make back up from the other <I> PC. To find a DOS based image software will be challenging.

I suggest you the following:

1. If you have a net work you can configure and run the imaging software from a dedicated PC which is connected in to the network. Software from Acronis will do the job (if you have the DOS based version?).

2. Software provider Norton use to have DOS based imaging software which was able to run from the DOS command. The data could be transferred from serial link, USB or stored direct in the PC.

Good Luck
A. Oztas

 

plenty of excellent software for recovering data off crashed drives, been there done that...

 

Oh, there's so many things wrong with the descriptions in this post, but, we shall move on anyway.

The easiest thing to do in this case is to take the new hard drive, once formatted and properly partitioned (a PC of that vintage will never properly recognize a 3GB hard drive partition) and connect it to the second IDE hard drive "location" of the running <I> operator interface. This means you will need to shut down the running <I> operator interface, open the CPU case, find the end of the IDE cable and an unused hard drive power connector, connect the new formatted, partitioned hard drive to the CPU, and the power-up the CPU. You will then likely have to go into the BIOS set-up and configure the BIOS to see the second hard drive, but it may automatically recognize the hard drive (some newer BIOSes would do that, but not all).

Once the <I> recognizes the new hard drive, let it boot up all the way to IDOS, exit to a command prompt, and then you can use MS-DOS COPY or XCOPY commands to basically "image" the contents of C: drive to the new hard drive (probably recognized as D. (Use the COPY and XCOPY Help to determine which switch or option to supply on the command line to copy all the boot sector files and all the other files and directories over to the new drive.)

Once that's done, you can then power down the <I>, remove the new hard drive, and put it in the CPU in place of the failed hard drive.

If you don't have all of the installation files on floppy or CD, this is your best and easiest shot, though if you don't have someone familiar with DOS it's probably going to be difficult.

If the CPUs of the two PCs have CD-R drives, you might try using COPY or XCOPY (with the appropriate switches/options) to copy the contents of the running <I>'s hard drive to a CD, and then copy from the CD to the new hard drive in the other CPU. (You will most likely have to remove the read-only attribute of EVERY file on the new hard drive if you do this, though....)

Once you have completed this, though, you will need to quickly look into getting new Mark V operator interfaces. Unless you have spare ARCnet cards, if they fail there are virtually none available to purchase anywhere that will work the ARCnet drivers of IDOS on <I> CPUs.

Best of luck!

 

Get clonezilla and clone the spare you are using now onto the new drive.

DOS knows nothing about 3Gb but it should work if you wipe the partition table and let clonezilla make one.

Regards
cww