6 Oct
2009
6 Oct
'09
2:59 p.m.
On Tue, 6 Oct 2009, Joachim Thiemann wrote:
> There are a few things I'd be worried about
here...
> ?- You need to know what parameters were used when formatting the drive.
> Usually these will be the ones printed on the drive label (or in the
> instruction book) but sometimes e.g. the cylinder count is reduced to get
> around bad cylinders, and so on.
That's only part of the picture. Many of the Xebec MFM/SCSI adapters had
their own reserved area on the drive for configuration and bad sector
maps. I wouldn't bet money on the raw track/sector format lining up with
anything an ISA bus MFM controller would understand.
Yes, dd would be nice, but that assumes a 32-bit
machine with a driver
for the card. That is my concern.
Hmmm, maybe an old Minix system could talk to the card :-) od the raw
device to the serial port, then capture the octal data and reassemble
the image file...
Given the above proviso, that's definitely the best bet. If you can
address the drive as a raw device it should be possible to figure out
offset to start of "real" data.
For extra credit, it would be fun to see if a modern SCSI adapter can be
made to communicate with the command syntax supported on early Xebec
boards. The earlier ones were only kinda, sorta SCSI-1 compliant. I
rememember seeing a Linux kernel driver for talking to the Xebec 1410
series, but it was probably more than 10 years ago.
Steve
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