On Nov 3, 2025, at 5:16 PM, Mike Katz via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
I just purchased an old Gimix computer (now if only I can get it from Orlando to Chicago
before my friend goes down there for Christmas).
It has an OMTI 20C-1 MFM hard disk controller with a IMI 5018 19MB hard disk drive in it.
It has been recommended that i don't even turn the system on with the hard drive in
it but rather I remove the drive an I send the IMI 18MB drive directly to a recovery house
for data recovery.
Why would you do that? What would you expect such a shop to be able to do with the drive?
If a drive is known to be bad, and you want to do a desperate (and expensive) attempt to
recover parts of it, this is how it's done. But if it isn't known bad, it seems
like a very expensive option just to read an old drive.
Also, if the format is obscure enough, you may not be able to find a data recovery shop
that knows it. But if you connect it to a Dave Gesswein MFM emulator, it can slurp the
waveforms right off the drive for safekeeping. Once that is done, you can use the
captured data with the emulator and not have to run the drive again. Or you can convert
the low level format to extract the data, if it is a known format. If it isn't a
known format, you then have an interesting exercise to reverse engineer how the disk is
encoded and teach Dave's software to handle that format. It's pretty much
universal, capable of coping with just about anything that is MFM.
paul