4 Apr
2005
4 Apr
'05
4:38 p.m.
At 05:18 PM 4/4/2005 -0500, you wrote:
From: "Ryan Underwood" <nemesis-lists at
icequake.net>
Sent: Monday, April 04, 2005 4:21 PM
I have been able to read many old MFM drives and the occasional RLL drive.
When the original controller was jumpered to lie about head or cylinder
count or other facts of drive geometry, I have be largely unable to read
those. This was several years ago.
OK, I posted about this a few weeks ago and now I have some more
information.
The drives in question are a ST-225 20MB (615/4/17) that came out of an
XT (so would have been using a 8-bit controller) and a ST-238R 30MB
(615/4/26) of unknown origin.
I don't have or even know what the original controllers were, the
machines were gutted/given away years ago by the owners.
I have a 386 testbed which I'm using, and plan to laplink the files over
to another machine once they are accessible.
The only card in the 386 is a VGA card. Turbo is off.
I have the following controllers:
- WD1002A-27X 8-bit RLL
- Adaptec ACB-2370A S2 16-bit RLL/floppy
- WD1002SV-SR2 16-bit RLL/floppy
- Everex EV-346 16-bit MFM/floppy
I also have two Miniscribe 8438 30MB RLL drives. However, they were
used with the 27X, which means the geometry is ambiguous depending on
how the jumpers were set when it was formatted.
<snip>
If you are trying to recover files you are probably wasting your time, the
XT controllers used unique formatting and you will never read the data off
of the drives without using controllers indentical with ones used
originally. It is not good enough to use the same brand or even chipset. Randy
www.s100-manuals.com
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