sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Panasonic Telephones & Systems Successfully cloned TVP200 HDD

Hi Everyone,

Since I have received some very helpful info from you in the past, I thought I would report here on my success in cloning my TVP200 Voice Mail Hard Disk Drive.

I found this KX-TVP200 for a good price. Year of manufacturing is 1997. This machine comes from a small business that shut down a few years ago. I was praying that the HDD would still work after sitting idle in an unknown environment for that long. It did. But as soon as I could, I started to work on cloning this HDD onto another one, knowing that if the original HDD failed, I would be in big trouble.

The original HDD is a 1.3GB drive. I had no idea of what was on this drive as far as OS, patrition and format, so my only hope for success was to try to clone it in a bit-by-bit/Sector-by-Sector fashion onto a somewhat bigger drive. I chose an old 3.2G drive I already had. I first tried the built-in TVP200 copy method described somewhere else on this forum, but it did not work, probably because the target drive was bigger and/or not recognized.

So I turned to an old PIII PC. I tried various cloning freeware (I prefered a diskette bootup version) and eventually found one free version that worked. I is called HDClone 4, by Miray Software. https://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

I initially put the source and target drives on the same IDE bus, configuring one as Master and the other as Slave, but the BIOS had issues with the Source Drive. I put both HDDs as Masters, one on the Primary bus and the other on the Secondary bus. That worked on my PC. I then did a sector-by-sector cloning, with no special settings required. Bingo, it worked! The Panasonic booted up like with the original drive. But I did not stop there...

I don't like the idea of a 24/7/365 continuously spinning drive, as it is the case on the TVP200. So I ordered in an IDE to SD card HDD adapter, the cheapest one I could find on eBay (<$10). I cloned the original drive onto a 2GB SD/MMC card, put that into the TVP200. It worked too! Now I have a totally silent TVP200.

For those who fear that the Flash technology inside the SD card has a limited write cycle life, let me say this: When the TVP200 sits idle, I don't hear much activity on the HDD. I thing it sits pretty much idle too. This TVP200 is installed in my home... with a typicall 100,000 write cycle expected life, I think it will work for many years to come.

There you go!

Bert.

whats the audio like using flash drive?

Exactly the same. Read access time on a flash drive is actually faster than on a HDD. So there should be no difference.

No one is going to waste time on that product now.

No one? really? I see those units still selling on eBay...

That trick will likely work on newer models too. That's why I thought I would share...

ebayers are not my clients !if for some reason I need a flash drive for tvs I can order one with a warrantee!No headaches

Thanks for the tip. We have a TVS75 with a noisy drive. The SD card / IDE adapter trick is something I will try out.

This solution also works well with a KX-TVS125, using HDClone. With this unit, the trick seems to be using a drive that is "very close" to the origional size of 41.1GB. Anything with a formatted capacity of less than 40GB or larger than 50GB does not seem to work.

Anyway, thanks for the Info. Now I have a spare for when the dinosaur dies!

I finally had a chance to try this on our TVS75 and did not succeed.

I bought an eBay IDE to SD card interface just for the hack. I used EASEUS Disk Copy 2.3 and did a sector by sector copy of the Panasonic drive to a 4GB SD card. The clone reported no errors, but the VM box will not boot from the flash drive.

I tried other SD cards. All I had were 1GB (too small) and 4GB (perhaps too big). So my failure may be due to the SD card size and it would have been nice to try a 2GB.

I may try again, but that will have to wait for a another rainy day.