[weblacky]

I will add one thing, you could do a some kind of ftp/ssh/etc network based tarball of the original disk before disk-to-disk cloning.

Perhaps by just focusing on another HDD setup under Irix and getting all the freeware command utilities working before hand.

The only reason I bring this up has to do with the fragility of the original drive. Unless you’re very certain about this drive a disk to disk copy using an image or other sector dumping method may result in the failure of the original drive because of its age and the workload.

Using a method other than file base copying means that if you have a failure during the initial procedure you’ve lost everything because you don’t even have the file system working at the destination with the files you’ve already copied.


Normally if you care about the data and it’s all about the data of course, you tend to want to try file-based backup of the source first, starting with the most critical files early than proceeding to the files you don’t necessarily care about, like the OS.

That is you copy files based on order of importance. Until you have everything. Then you’re free to try the whole thing again with another form of copy without much fear of a disk failure because at least you have the individual files themselves sitting on a network file
server somewhere or whatever that you could always load a new IRIX via install media and piece back together the software & data manually, at worst case.


I work at a business where some data recovery is considered part of the job and if you don’t necessarily know the condition of what you’re dealing with you go for the golden statue first and then work your way outside to the surrounding, less important, treasures until you have everything.

I’ve seen people just immediately go for sector base copying or DD or something like that to a destination disk only to have the disk with the source fail and now they’re left with nothing, in order to even recognize the data they already have they now need advanced file recovery tools because they’re dealing with a portion of a destination file system. Instead of having a known, working, destination file system and simply copying files first.