6 Oct
2009
6 Oct
'09
9:17 a.m.
On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 11:51, Philip Pemberton <classiccmp at philpem.me.uk> wrote:
I was asking since a google returned a message on the kernel
developers list (199? timeframe, 2.0 kernel) complaining about the
nonfunctional xd driver and suggesting it'd be removed in future.
I still have a set of original RH5.2 install CD's I'll check those
once I find them :-)
I was actually assuming the way to get this drive working was to find
a 8086 class machine (thus it'd be the primary controller) - so dd
would not be an applicable command; then somehow use DOS either from
the 5Meg partition (that should still be there if the drive kept all
its bits in place) or a floppy to somehow dump the raw HD bits off.
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...
Joe.
--
Joachim Thiemann :: http://www.tsp.ece.mcgill.ca/~jthiem
Joachim Thiemann wrote:
That may be a difficult bit. All documentation - if there ever was
some - is long gone. The Amiga and Sidecar have been through many
moves, and was last used sometime around 1993/4 when it was replaced
by the A3000.
? I have an old MFM drive (MiniScribe 8425) hooked up to a Xebec
1210C 8-bit ISA controller, pulled out of my Amiga 1060 sidecar,
[...]
I can get a hold of a 1998-era PC, mainly PCI
but
still with a single 16-bit ISA slot - but I have no idea if there is
any software that can then get the bits off the drive.
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. ?- As it's an 8-bit card, it should work fine in a
16-bit ISA slot. Problem
is, it may well conflict with the motherboard's onboard IDE controller (if
it has one, which is likely). At the very least you'll need to configure the
Xebec card as a secondary controller, then turn off the secondary IDE
controller in the BIOS.
I found a page describing the jumpers for the controller by googling
"Xebec" and the assembly-number (104866 or something, I don't have it
in front of me) so moving the address is certainly an option.
ISTR that the
xd driver in linux was broken or removed, or is the card WD100x
compatible?
It's still in the 2.6 kernel source... No idea if it works, but in any case
you'll probably have to build a custom kernel to use it (I'll bet most Linux
distros won't compile it in by default). Will the 8-bit
BIOS on the card
work in a Celeron class machine?
Should do. Worst case, pull the EPROM chip or flip the ROM_DISABLE jumper.
If somehow I find a sufficiently old
PC, how can I get the data off the non-MS-DOS partition?
$ su -
# dd if=/dev/hd(whatever the Xebec comes up as) of=/root/hdd_image
Then copy hdd_image off onto another (faster) machine for processing.