20 Oct
2013
20 Oct
'13
6:44 a.m.
On 19/10/2013 09:04, Raymond Wiker wrote:
On Oct 19, 2013, at 05:22 , Josh Dersch <derschjo
at gmail.com> wrote:
I think this is I think going to become a common problem. I have an
IBM3174 screen controller. I have plenty of spares for most of it, but
out of the three hard disks I have only one works reliably. They are
ST125 disks so once upon a time they were pretty common. These days, not
so easy to find. I know other users who want to do the same with older
PDP/11 systems to keep them as original as possible. I think the same
issues are going to arise with earlier drives such as the cartridge
drives used in IBM-1130 many PDP-11 systems. The cartridges for these
are not going to last forever....
There are MFM/ST506 to flash converters out there, so I found this one:-
http://www.amazon.com/dtx-300-Hard-Drive-Emulator/dp/B00BQY55M2
but at $2300 its a bit outside my price range. There is also "discferret"
http://discferret.com/wiki/DiscFerret
which looks like it could evolve into something really useful, but it
looks like I would have to build one from scratch. What would be really
nice would be to have something like this:-
http://www.amazon.co.uk/3-5-Inch-Floppy-Drive-Emulator/dp/B0083Z29JO
at a similar price, but I guess thats not going to happen any time
soon......
The Sage has a fairly powerful BIOS (the "Multi-user BIOS"), which may
have functionality that would make your task easier. If this question
had come up 15 years ago, I would have been able to be more specific,
but I traded my Sage and all the documentation I had back then.
Dave
Hi all -
Snagged a Sage IV machine, running p-System (IV.21) with the Modula-2 suite installed on
the internal hard drive (which I believe is 20mb; I haven't disassembled the machine
far enough to ID the drive and I don't have any of the hard drive utilities available
on the machine to probe with). I'd like to back up the hard drive before I do
anything else with this thing, especially since I don't think the Modula-2 software
has been archived anywhere (if I'm incorrect in this regard do let me know). Plus
there's a sweet half-finished Vampire novel on the drive that I simply must save.
Anyone have any experience with these and have any backup suggestions? I'm
considering writing a quick Modula-2 program to dump the drive sector-by-sector over the
serial port but if there's some prior art here I'm a big fan of saving time.
Incidentally -- anyone have any contact with David Erhart, the guy who runs
sageandstride.org? His FTP site (which hosts a lot of the documentation, schematics &
software) is currently down; I've e-mailed him to no response. (Anyone happen to have
this stuff archived?)
Thanks as always,
Josh
I'm pretty sure that the disk is MFM; it may be possible to attach a second
disk and copy the contents of the original disk to that. There may even be adapters from
MFM to something a bit more current.