Archiving Software

Write a set of programs to transfer the disks sector by sector to the PC over a serial link. This is what I did with the NorthStar system and it works very well. Asuming the guy has a bootable system, he can use the programs you write to recreate the disks (assuming you made them two way). Gettng that first boot disk is trickier - What did for the NorthStar system was to make a complete "in memory" image of the OS and serial transfer client, so that you could load it (via a bootstrap loader entered through the front panel or a ROM monitor) and write out the disks. This may require the "end user" to drop in a little ROM monitor to his system long enough to make the boot disks - this is far easier to do than to try and recreate a hard-sector disk by other means. You don't - archive the 8" disk as an image. It's *FAR* more important to get the original data/media archived then it is to be creating custom formats for people. Once the data is archived and available, then you have a number of options when you want to read the data in the future: - Dig up an 8" drive and attach it to your PC, recreate the original disk, then connect the drive to your SystemX, boot/mount it and pull the files off. - Variation of above: Use a 5.25" HD drive (electrically the same as an 8" drive). - Use this list to find someone who can move the files for you. - Using the documented format of the image, and knowlege of your OS file structure, write a utility to extract the individual files that you need directly from the image. - Using the documented format of the image, extract the sectors and write them to an IDE drive, Flash card, or whatever is suitable at the time that you do this, attach the device to your system, and write/patch-in a driver to read the "new" media as an 8" drive. - Other ideas that may come to mind at the time. The alternative, is to never get around do backing up the data because you can't think of or find the time to do it in a completely universal fashion, which severely limits the future options of anyone who does not have the disk (or yours when the disk becomes unreadable): - Hopeing that you will be able to find someone who has made images of these disks so that you can explore means of recovering the data. Exactly as above. Image the bootable disk, and copy the TAR file to a PC and archive it with the image. Or if possible, copy it to other "target system" disks and image the lot. Just make sure that you preserve the data and document what exactly you did. Then you have at least provided an option for people in the future to find their own means of converting that data into something that they can use - otherwise, once the disk and/or tape goes bad the system is completely lost (and even before this happens, it's unavailable to anyone else). Regards, Dave -- dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html