I'm attempting to restore/boot up a machine that worked twice in the last month before the IDE drives gave out and I haven't been able to recover those to image another drive. I'm essentially starting from scratch while reading this forum and seeing what others have done in the past.
## CNC machine
Phoenix RG510 XHD
## Workstation/computer
Appears to be a workstation from early 1990s with several ISA boards
Serial #2016 + (unclear what this number is, but it's beside the serial number on the back of the workstation: 002356)
This sits inside of a metal cabinet that hosts a CRT monitor + other boards + drivers.
Boot error
## Attempt 1 - restoring data from drive
I've attempted to restore data from IDE drives. While I was able to get the internal disks to spin, the drives did not mount on Ubuntu, macOS in order to start copying the data from the boot drive. I've purchased an IDE drive from eBay ( knowing it might not work since those are no longer manufactured ) which also failed in a similar way.
## Attempt 2 - IDE to CF card
SanDisk Ultra II CompactFlash 2GB
StarTech IDE to CF adapter w/ ejector ( red board - has only ability to change main vs slave drive )
StarTech IDE to CF adapter w/out ejector ( blue board - has ability to change voltage and other settings ) Attempting to image the CF card to FAT16 on both Ubuntu and macOS seemed to work with roughly the same steps ( here's on macOS ):
Code: Select all
diskutil list
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk6
diskutil partitiondisk /dev/disk6 1 MBR "MS-DOS FAT16" "CNCDOS" 0B
diskutil info /Volumes/CNCDOS/
sudo dd if= of=/dev/disk6 bs=64K conv=noerror,sync
However, once the CF card was plugged into the workstation the BIOS would error with "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER".
Shutting down the workstation and attempting to plug in the CF card back into the machine used to image the CF card makes the CF card unreadable ( no contents, no partition, etc.. ).
## Questions:
1. Has anyone run into something similar? Anything else I could try to revive the system OR am I missing steps above that are specific to the motherboards and modern CF cards ?
2. What's the path for moving away from this system to something more modern?
I'm having a hard time identifying which components inside the old workstation + the cabinet have modern equivalents and how to transition forward. Obviously there'd be a modern NUC/workstation, ?some other intermediate board?. I'd appreciate advice/insight on this question or pointers to links to read
Thank you for your time!