Re: Reading an ST506 disk?

At Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:57:44 -0500 Allen Kistler <ackistler@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Friend has a couple of old 40Mbyte ST506 MFM drives with data on..but
the machine that used to read them has died..its not a PC.

Plenty of old hardware around, but no ISA MFM disk controller..

Assuming we could find one, what chance is there of picking an old
motherboard that has an ISA slot, and putting say debian on it using an
IDE drive to booot from, and mounting up the ST506's and reading them?

Even if the files system wasn't understood, we could still read them raw
and decipher the data..or could we?

Digging through dusty memories here, but ...

You'll probably need to find a 586 (Pentium) motherboard. It was around
Pentium Pro and Pentium III days that motherboards went all-PCI.

I have a PII (Slot1/ATX) motherboard with one shared ISA/PCI slot.
There do exist ATX motherboards (686 processor-based) with ISA slots.


I also recall that MFM/RLL drive controllers needed to have specific
support for the CHS values of the drive in its BIOS. Otherwise you'd
pick CHS values that were less than the physical values and live with
the fact that you weren't using your whole drive. The CHS values are
still in the partition table (sort of), so if you can image a bigger
portion, you just restrict yourself to the part that's used. It did
mean that moving drives around between controllers virtually never
worked, though. (In other words, good luck and expect a hassle.)


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