19 Oct
2013
19 Oct
'13
1:04 a.m.
On Oct 19, 2013, at 05:22 , Josh Dersch <derschjo at gmail.com> 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has been archived anywhere (if I'm incorrect in this regard do let me know).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
I'm pretty sure that the disk is MFM; it may be possible to attach a second disk and
copy the contents of the original disk to that. There may even be adapters from MFM to
something a bit more current.
The Sage has a fairly powerful BIOS (the "Multi-user BIOS"), which may have
functionality that would make your task easier. If this question had come up 15 years ago,
I would have been able to be more specific, but I traded my Sage and all the documentation
I had back then.