[Techtoolslist] FLUKE 9100A SERIES QUESTION

[Martin White]

To be honest, the route I took is probably out of date by now and it's probably worth researching again as better parts may now be available! You'll probably find a lot of this already in the tech tools mailing list archives.

Off the top of my head though...

I bought a SCSI to PCMCIA adapter that came in a 5.25" bay from a seller on eBay who was selling them for use with Synthesisers. He happened to have 1 left. It actually came in an external case but that was discarded.

Next I bought, again off eBay a PCMCIA to Compact Flash adapter and a couple of second hand compact flash cards - I must have been feeling really tight at the time!

Installing was a simple case of just plugging it all together.

Imaging the drive was the bit where it could have all gone horribly wrong but I had the common sense to not put the hard drive anywhere near a Windows PC. I remember putting the drive into my PC and booting it into linux or it may have been OS X seeing as I use a PC running OS X. I guess I must have had a scsi card kicking around somewhere that linux liked as it's not something that I would normally have installed.

To actually produce the image I just did a raw 'dd' at block level of the entire drive "dd if='/dev/sda' of=fname bs=4096" or something presumably. The hard drive was then safely put on the shelf where it's stayed ever since.

Restoring the image to the compact flash card will have been a reverse of the procedure. You obviously loose any unused CF card space though. Not a problem to me.

Now I have a couple of 60MB hard drives that can just be swapped about at will. Not that I do, but they COULD :o)

I don't remember any issues or gotchas and I seem to remember that it all just worked first time.

If I was doing it again then maybe I'd see if there was a SCSI to IDE solution or something. I used PCMCIA because it's what came up at the time.

Hope that's of some help.

Martin.

On 30 Nov 2010, at 19:28, Martin White wrote:


> I don't really want this to drag on, but briefly.

> 

> They're not really that hard to get hold of. When I wanted one I asked on here, within no time (maybe 24h, I forget!) I had a response, a few more days payment was exchanged and within the week it had flown across the pond and was on my doorstep. Really wasn't difficult.

> 

> Some time later another came up for sale on German eBay that I got for very, very little money £30? that one came with all the parallel and vector pods i could ever need. Sadly the 9100 unit itself turned up smashed to pieces due to lack of packing. Including a destroyed display and a motherboard that blows the house fuse!! Totally beyond repair. Good for some spares though.

> 

> As far as the image goes, yeah, it's technically possible, but only in the same way as it's technically possible to take an image of an NTSC drive and edit it. Actually, that's a bad comparison as that IS possible with the Fuse NTFS driver and a loopback device mount.

> 

> I looked into this when I first imaged my drive since I'd actually like to be able to do it. I believe there is an OS 9 (not Apple OS 9) file system driver available commercially for Windows. But it costs and I was rather skint after doing the conversion in the first place. I also suspect it was for floppies only and my PC doesn't have  a native floppy. I may have another look. In theory all you need is a file system driver installed on a Linux box, mount the image and off you go.

> 

> For now though, nope, can't modify the image even if I wanted to. Maybe every 6 months I take a backup image if I remember and that's as far as it goes.

> 

> Martin.

> 

> On 30 Nov 2010, at 17:06, Danny Pearson wrote:

> 

>> There's no love shared for the 9100 cos they're so damn hard to find.  I'd

>> readily share anything I did on one if I ever get one, but then I don't have

>> anything to lose from sharing whereas a lot of people who already have them

>> do (at a guess).

>> 

>> Can you create an image an cut out the stuff you don't want to share?   Be

>> good to have a readily available vanilla image I'm sure.

>> 

>> Dan

>> 

>> -----Original Message-----

>> From: techtoolslist-bounces at flippers.com

>> [mailto:techtoolslist-bounces at flippers.com] On Behalf Of

>> martin at guddler.co.uk

>> Sent: 30 November 2010 16:22

>> To: jrr at flippers.com; Technical Tools Mail List

>> Subject: Re: [Techtoolslist] FLUKE 9100A SERIES QUESTION

>> 

>> I have an image for 6.1

>> 

>> 1. How would I know if it's serialised?

>> 2. My machine is an FT does it matter?

>> 3. Related to point 2, it might matter that the image would be for a 60mb

>> drive as that's what my scsi drive was before I went down the compact flash

>> road.

>> 

>> I'd be happy enough for the image to be used on an ad-hoc basis. Not so sure

>> I'd be happy for it to be hosted for the whole world to grab.

>> 

>> Not sure how that last paragraph will sit with people but I hope you'd

>> understand. I have stuff on here I've put hard work into and there seems to

>> be barely any sharing the love when it comes to 9100's :)

>> 

>> Maybe that could change?

>> 

>> Martin.

>> 

> 

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