Problem with the Hard Disc of Agfa Accuset 1200

[marantvou]

Hello ,
I have an Agfa Accuset 1200 with an internal rip and the hard disc broke down. I replaced it with another one (the same model) and it isn't working.
When I turn on the machine, it remains at "off line rip booting". Does anyone know what is going wrong ?
Thanks in advance.

 

[VladCanada]

You have to format that HD with a special PostScript commands to make it bootable and to download boot files, ethernet communication files, PS interpreter, fonts and screening tiles like ABS, Standart and Adobe Accurate Screening.
All files were stored on 1.44M floppies. MAC or PC versions.
Without HD RIP Star 200 will boot with PS interpreter from its own ROM but will not be workable.

Time to say good bye... and purchase software RIP

 

[kyle]

I don't have a clue about what you need to have on the hard drive, but I do know that most of the time when hard drives fail, it's a surface error and you can get nearly all of the data off. If it's a mechanical failure or a blown circuit, all of the data is probably good but you'd need someone to swap parts to get to it. A common scenario is a single sector becomes unreadable, and the operating system locks up when trying to read it.

If you know anything about Linux, or are willing to learn, there's a very good utility called ddrescue that will copy the entire hard drive to a fresh one (as long as it's the same size or larger). It won't crap out once it hits a bad sector, but will skip over it and copy everything that's good, returning to the bad sectors at the end to retry them as many times as you'd like. If you don't have linux installed anywhere, you just need a live CD of one of the linux distributions, and you can boot the entire operating system off the CD and start copying from one hard drive to another.

 

[VladCanada]

kyle, do you know what kind and capacity HD needs for RIP Star 200?
SCSI HD and 213MB volume only, and formatted for 200 MB.
That RIP does not worth even my time to type this post.

 

[marantvou]

Thank you both VladCanada and Kyle for your answers.

I didn't mentioned before that the Accuset has an internal hardware rip from another imagesetter, I don't know exactly which, I think Avantra, I'm not sure, in order to be faster (I bought it as it is from another person a few years ago) and the hard disc that don't work is a SEAGATE MEDALIST ST51080N 1GB 3.5IN SCSI 2 FAST 50PIN. I don't know if it changes something or not.

The truth is that I don't know much about formatting Hard Discs and thinks like that.
But I didn't understand how to get access to the hard disc I bought and is connected in the Accuset from my Mac in order to format or copy files from the broke one to the new one. The program will do it and its only on Linux because I don't have and I don't know anything about this operating system. If you could explain it more simple I would appreciate it ???

Thanks again for your time.

 

[kyle]

I found this on the internet, and it looks like a good tutorial:

Mucking About With Technology: Disk Cloning (for Data Recovery) with GNU ddrescue

I would suggest you put in the boot CD, turn off the computer, then disconnect all drives except for the bad drive and the new replacement drive. This prevents you from accidentally doing something bad to any other drives in the computer.

It is very important that you know for sure when running the command ddrescue which system device is the bad drive and which is the new one. If you get that backwards, you'll overwrite the bad drive with data from the new one, which is the opposite of what you need to do. If you can hot-swap the drives, you could start up with just the bad one connected, run the "fdisk -l" command to verify you see /dev/sda only, then insert the new drive, wait a minute, run "fdisk -l" again and verify you see both /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. You'll then know for sure sda is the failed drive and sdb is the new drive. Double check that the new drive is at least as large as the failed one.

 

[VladCanada]

Accuset 1200 means Accuset 1000 imagesetter with embedded RIP board and HD /RIP Star 200/.
You need some kind of access to that RIP, using special AGFA program like AgfaSet (PC or MAC version) or another PostScript downloader.

For 1Gb HD you have to create postscript files in Notepad and save them as for example:
lowlevel.ps and highlevel.ps

If you want to spend your time - read and perform procedures from attached file.

Please don't ask me for help, I waste too many hours trying to find that info, and I do not want to waste more time for free.
I do not touch Star RIPs probably for 15 years.
BTW this information is 21 years old.
Good luck!