20 Oct
2013
20 Oct
'13
3:21 p.m.
As a follow up to my own post, I did manage to capture images of the
individual partitions on the Sage IV's drive. For future reference, the
UTILITY floppy has a program called "SEND" on it which will send
(excruciatingly slowly) the contents of a given partition over the
serial port, encoded as a series of ASCII hexadecimal digits.
That took all night, but it did finish and I hacked up a program to
convert them to a raw binary image. It's not quite a complete image of
the hard drive (missing the partition / bad block tables, etc) but it's
at least a backup; incidentally if anyone has any idea how to get
Partition 0 (the 'whole disk' partition) to show up as a Device under
the p-System, SEND could be used to create a full disk image.
Otherwise, sometime this week I'll try to hack something together.
The partition images can be found at:
http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/sage/
Thanks to all those who provided suggestions, on- and off-list.
- Josh
On 10/18/2013 8:22 PM, Josh Dersch wrote:
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software has been archived anywhere (if I'm incorrect in this regard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