Backing up ST506 disks

Put an ST506 controller into a PC. ST506/412 was the defacto standard on PCs until IDE. although most PC people erroneously refer to the cabling and interface as "MFM". The controllers used by IBM in the XT were made by Xebec. Once you have a controller and drive in your PC, you can write the code to read and write sectors to be able to copy a drive. -- It would be easier to use basic SCSI commands to talk to the S1410 controller directly. I have the documentation on line, and as long as no other peripheral is on the SCSI chain, it should work fine (SCSI is a superset of SASI) When you write the copy program, remember to have some fallback strategy WHEN you read a bad sector (filling with ascii "BAD SECT" for example) since you may not get any data back. You'll also need to figure out the disc geometry, sector length, etc. since you have to set these parameters into the S1410 before you can do anything. This may require some experimentation, but it isn't likely that they would have used anything other than 128,256, or 512 bytes/sector. the S1410 manual can be found at www.spies.com/aek/pdf/xebec/S1410Man.pdf