recovering data from old hard drive

[Jon Elson]

On 01/26/2020 01:13 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:
> On 1/25/20 12:57 PM, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote:
>> I have dug out an old SCSI hard drive from 1997 that may 
>> have some interesting stuff, most especially the source 
>> code for the SGI Iris flight sim demo.  I have a Linux 
>> system with an Adaptec 2940 (aic7880) that has two 
>> connectors on it.  It SEEMS from some probing that the 
>> 50-pin IDC connector on the top of the board is 
>> single-ended SCSI (it seems to have mostly grounds on one 
>> row of pins).  Same for the drive, which is a Quantum 
>> ProDrive LPS.  The drive spins up and does some seeking 
>> right after power-on, so it sounds like it is working. 
>> But, I can't seem to find that the drive is being 
>> recognized by the aic7xxx driver.  So, looking at 
>> /proc/scsi/aic7xxx/## I see the device addresses all show 
>> just the negotiation settings, and /proc/scsi/scsi just 
>> shows my SATA devices but not the real SCSI ones.
>
> I believe Adaptec 2940s were all Single Ended.  I /think/ 
> the differential cards that they made had a different number.
>
> Go into the cards BIOS (firmware?) and poke around.  Does 
> the card see the drive?
>
Well, I set up another machine with a different Adaptec 2940 
and was able to read two SCSI drives that had not spun
in 22 years!  Unfortunately, I could not find the files I 
was looking for, but I backed up the entire contents anyway.

Jon