27 Jun
2007
27 Jun
'07
12:28 a.m.
On 26 Jun 2007 at 19:08, David W. Erhart wrote:
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.
David, I can only vaguely remember seeing Pinnacles when my firm was
looking for micro alternatives to another VAX and 68K systems were on
the list We eventually ended up with a Plexus and were very unhappy
with the performance. Water under the bridge.
I think the chances of a PC MFM controller making sense out of your
hard disk are remote at best. Address marks, CRC polynomials and a
host of other variables generally makes for lots of incompatibility
between controllers. But it might give you some good information.
By hooking the drive up to PC and then using INT 13 services to probe
sectors at random, you should be able to determine if the drive will
at least seek. You'll get "sector not found" or "seek error"
status
back, but you'll be able to observe the drive and see if it's
working.
You can also try another MFM drive on the Pinnacle to see if it's at
least accessed by the controller.
What's the controller chip on the Pinnacle for the hard disk?
Do you have any documentation on the system?
Cheers,
Chuck