Reading ESDI disks

[Fred Cisin]

On Thu, 11 Feb 2021, Mattis Lind via cctalk wrote:
> What is the best way of dumping the contents of an ESDI disk?

Same as for ST506/412

> I have an original IBM Enhanced ESDI ISA controller board. Could that be
> used under Linux? Or NetBSD/FreeNSD? I googled but didn't find much.

Do you have suitable drivers?
Yes, ESDI has been used with Linux.
In some cases, probably including the IBM ESDI controller, it looks 
similar to the computer as an ST506/412 setup.

Start with another drive, and get your controller, drive, and OS working 
with each other as ordinary drive, BEFORE trying to read an alien disk 
using them.  It is generally important to isolate variables, so that you 
can determine whether problems are your setup or are problems with the 
alien drive.

> Is there any other way of dumping the disk contents?

IS IT THE SAME controller that the drive was written with??
If so, no problem.
If not, PROBLEMS.