Cloning and Backing up the JVC HM-HDS1 Hard Drive

CLONING AND BACKING UP THE JVC HM-HDS1 HARD DRIVE

This procedure will describe how to clone or backup an existing hard drive. It also assumes that you have a working knowledge of PC hardware and an ability to think laterally if need be…

Disclaimer: I will not be held responsible for any disasters arising from any instructions detailed below. Use them at your own risk. Having said that, I have had nothing but success with these procedures, so you should be fine.

Cloning pre-requisites:

  1. Two physically working hard drives (the original and a replacement). The original does not have to actually work in the JVC, but it must be visible by the BIOS in a PC. The replacement needs to be the identical model. Do not use any other type of drive. It will not work.

Note: At the time of writing, we believe the JVC's 'motherboard' EEPROM to be limited to a certain type of drive. This means only one type of drive geometry. So far I have had three other people with the same drive as me (Maxtor 40GB, P/N MX4K040H2) One US person curiously had a Quantum, which I need to investigate the drive geometry for. It may well be the same. WTS...

  1. A PC. Yes, you will need one of these. In fact it’s pretty crucial to the whole operation. It should have at least two spare IDE connectors in it to connect the two drives to.
  2. Some drive imaging/cloning software. I have personally tested Ghost and DFSEE. These work, but there may be others that do. Whichever one you choose, make sure that it will copy every sector on the drive, regardless of content. This is also sometimes known as ‘raw’ mode.

The cloning procedure (using Ghost)

  1. Turn off your JVC – this is important. To my eternal shame, I have blown mine up before because I forgot to do this.
  2. Remove the case. Two silver screws either side and three black screws at the back.
  3. Remove the hard drive from the JVC. (this should be obvious)
  4. On the PC, decide where you are going to run Ghost from. I personally use a couple of floppies: one bootable and one with ghost.exe on. You may also choose to have access to another hard disk in the same PC while you are doing this. This could be your original C: drive, be bootable, and have ghost.exe on. It’s up to you. Either way, it’s sufficient to use the DOS version of Ghost. This also avoids the possibility of Windows (in its infinite wisdom) trying to write anything to the JVC drive.
  5. Plug in the original drive to an IDE connector. The original drive is set to MASTER, so make sure you don’t connect it to onto the same cable as another MASTER device. If you need to make it a slave, then rearrange the jumpers at the back of the drive to match the settings for a SLAVE. The MASTER/SLAVE/CABLE SELECT legend is usually depicted on the label of the drive. If you feel unhappy at changing these settings then simply remove the existing MASTER device. You may have to end up using Ghost on floppies, but that’s not an issue.
  6. Plug in the new (replacement) drive. As with the original drive, make sure you address the MASTER/SLAVE issue detailed above. It doesn’t matter which drive is MASTER or SLAVE, as long as a single IDE channel doesn’t have more than one of each type on it.
  7. Boot up the PC. Hopefully your PC’s BIOS will recognise the new drives automatically. Take care here and make sure you know which drive is on which IDE channel and whether it is a MASTER or SLAVE. You don’t want to overwrite the original JVC disk!
  8. Run Ghost. You will need to use the command line switch ‘-ir’. Thus the full command line you’d use would be ‘ghost -ir’
  9. If Ghost asks you to put a special marker or identifier on the drive, say NO. I’m not sure what this does, but you certainly don’t want Ghost tampering with your JVC drive in any way.
  10. Navigate through the easy-to-use Ghost interface and choose Local, Disk, To Disk. You should then choose the source disk (your original JVC) and destination disk (the new replacement). NB: Make sure you get this right. Failure to do so will result in you overwriting your original disk, and you really don’t want to do that.
  11. Follow the prompts and you finally get to the ‘OK to GO’ button. With heart in mouth, choose OK and wait… a long time… oh, such a long time.. When I cloned my drive, it took about 5 hours to do. I put this down to the fact that it was full of recordings. What are recordings made of? MPEG2 – and of course, this is compressed data. I suspect Ghost attempts to compress the data before copying it, and if it can’t then it won’t copy as fast as a ‘normal’ Windows drive. Of course, Windows drives can be intelligently and quickly copied because Ghost is FAT/FAT32/NTFS aware and only copies the pertinent data. Unfortunately, you can’t tell Ghost just to copy the JVC operating system and not the data because it knows nothing of the JVC file format. When I created an image (file) of my JVC drive, it amounted to near enough the same size as the actual drive itself (38GB).
  12. Once finished, you can pop the new drive into the JVC and power it up. The first time you power it up you’ll see the JVC logos flashing in a repeated sequence for about 30 seconds. The unit then turns itself off. You can then power it up normally and all should be well.

Creating an image of your JVC drive.

If you are of a nervous disposition, you should make a backup of your drive before cloning it. This involves copying all the data from your original drive to another. The data ends up spilt across several 2GB chunks (that’s the way Ghost does it). This way, you have a completely safe backup of it should anything go wrong during cloning. Bear in mind thatwhen I created an image of my JVC drive, it amounted to near enough the same size as the actual drive itself (38GB). This is because I had once used all the drive up in recordings. Even though I had deleted them, the MPEG2 data stays intact – and is not very compressible.

Use the same procedure as above except you need another drive of the same or greater capacity in addition to your new drive. This drive will then be your Ghost destination drive and will also need to be formatted as FAT or FAT32. In Ghost you can then choose the Local, Disk, To Image option. In this case, the new drive is easily identified as it can be browsed to using the Ghost interface. If asked about compression, I’d go for it, but it may not make a huge difference, depending upon how full your drive had ever become with recordings.

If you now want to clone your drive, then you can pop your new identical replacement drive into the PC and follow the Cloning procedure above.

Can I upgrade to a larger drive?

If I had £1 for every time I got asked this, I’d have £12.75 in my pocket… or something close to that. The short answer is no. As discussed above, the EEPROM on the ‘motherboard’ will only cope with one type of drive geometry. Simply replacing the 40GB drive with a bigger one will simply not work.

If you send your unit in for repair and the hard disk needs replacing then the JVC service centre will fit an 80GB drive. Whoopee, you may cry. Not so fast…all they do is to fit the 80GB drive (‘cos you can’t get 40GB drives any more) and replace the EEPROM. This is no simple task, as it is a surface-mounted device and very tricky without the correct equipment. This new EEPROM simply allows the detection and operation of different drive geometry. Unfortunately only 40GB of the total 80GB is used. Thanks JVC. Thanks a bunch.

Page 1 of 2 / Copyright 2005. Andy Cippico.