26 Jun
2007
26 Jun
'07
11:45 p.m.
On Tue, 2007-06-26 at 19:08 -0400, David W. Erhart wrote:
Hello cctalkers,
I'm trying to help someone recover data from an MFM drive in an old Pinnacle 1a
system that had MirageOS installed. The system hasn't been booted in years and no
longer boots to the hard disk. The drive spins up and sounds okay. We've tried to
track down a copy of the MirageOS boot diskettes for the Pinnacle 1a system but
haven't found any after looking for months.
It's time to come up with a "Plan B". Does anyone have a suggestion about
how to read the "raw" data from the MFM hard disk? I was thinking about putting
in into an older PC based system with an MFM controller and using some utilities to dump
sectors to files that I could convert into something readable/usable. I haven't done
this before so I'm hoping someone smarter has a 'cunning plan' of how to do
this. I'm a programmer and don't mind write some utilities to pick apart the data
after it's off the hard drive.
Any ideas are appreciated.
Unfortunately MFM controllers tend not to be interchangeable. For the
most part, you can't swap a drive onto a different controller and expect
it to read and write properly. I suppose if you're just reading it, it
can't hurt to try. Doubtless someone will point out why it's a bad idea
to do that though.
Gordon