So there’s this oldish arcade racing game in a friends warehouse that needs its HDD’s and USB sticks (read on) replaced before they fail and leave us with a 1000 pound paper-weight.
It’s a Sega Ford Racing 2 Player setup from -06, prolly irrelevant, but both modules (player 1 and player 2) are ran by a normal x86 PC in each, running Windows XP (and just autostarting the game at boot) with USB sticks as keys which prevents the machines from booting if the stick aren’t inserted in their assigned ports.
So for the HDD’s I figured replacing them with fresh HDD’s, maybe WD reds, instead of SSD’s for longevity and since IO speeds aren’t a primarity. Or am I missing something? Normal SATA.
BUT, the thing I’m skeptical about is copying both the HDD’s and USB sticks 1:1 without having WinXP breaking or whining, I haven’t looked at the drives yet but I assume XP is checking the fingerprints of the USB keys, rather than them having a stored key-file.
Would a simple dd just work, even if the drives (both HDD and USB) would be of different capacity than the original ones?
IF the USB keys are indeed fingerprinted, could they still be copied?
dd should work if the keys are not fingerprinted and the drive they are going onto is bigger than the source.
If keys are finger printed then there is not much you can do besides breaking out a debugger and removing the check or contacting sega for replacement keys
@Dje4321
Figured as such. Sure there would be a way to just disable the sumcheck if the thumbdrives would turn out to be a pain-in-the-butt but would be nice to keep the machine as original as possible, at least function-wise.
It’s just that shit breaks sooner or later so some upgrades are inevitable.
@FaunCB
Really? Surely depends on the quality but I thought reds would be more reliable to run for another 10 years
And yeah, would be good to replace other components as well but these are the main ones to worry about.
there is no reason to just clone the drives and try it out anyway. if it doesnt work then revert back to original and play around on the cloned drive in a attempt to bypass the checks.
In an SSD the only thing you worry about is a power surge. You disk won’t shatter, or the scan arms won’t scratch the disk, or the SMART check won’t blank out the controller, or or or etc. Because an SSD doesn’t have any of that.
given the fact that winXP know how to properly work an SSD which I am doubtful about. So since the WinXP works and with a complete 1:1 it should work why introduce a radical change to the system that may won’t work?
So there is a catch to it, needs to be SP3. Which it may is. Well, if that is more beneficial great! Lets go with an SSD but introducing different hardware in an old system… Win fucked me too many times before to recommend that to someone. Pure anecdotal of course.
Edith: I got my first SSD in I wanna say 2011/2012 and Win7 was out for quite some time then. So I never had an WinXP+SSD Combo, my dude.
Theres a controller on the SSD that interfaces with the computer as if its spinning rust. Its no different than a USB drive, just faster and on a different interface.
Also given that SSDs have a nearly unlimited life when looking at read only it would last much longer than the rest of the machine.
Would you even need trim given that the system isnt really writing/deleting?
I’m pretty sure that Win does some internal processes that deleting and write some sort of data or cache or logs or what have you. TRIMM should be ON just for in case. Just saying.
I mean theres BITS but that can be disabled in the services. The application itself might do some light writing for some things but that should be about it. I cant imagine it would need TRIM but I guess it cant hurt.
Well there’s a bunch of variables, HDD to SSD, introducing new hardware to an old OS, I’m assuming the HDD is in IDE mode but that’s just a guess, the USB thing and what have you.
But I’ll test with a spare SSD tomorrow to see how it works out.
One would assume since it’s a bit-to-bit copy it should be fine but the older you get you also learn there’s more stuff you didn’t know about or took into consideration ¯\ _ (ツ)_/¯
I think thats a fair assumption. AHCI required a driver on XP I’m pretty sure. I’m fairly certain you should be able to get an SSD to work and if so then it would mean drive life probably longer than the machine will exist in theory. Less moving parts is always a good idea. I would use an MLC drive over TLC but either of them would be good I think.
I may be missing something obvious, but is there anything in place preventing you from putting the new drive into the machine, booting to any sort of *nix USB stick, and dd’ing to the new drive?
Seems like a simple procedure to me, as long as you pick something hardware compatible…
