Backing up ST506 disks

From: Al Kossow <aek_at_spies.com>
Date: Mon Aug 4 14:49:00 2003

 Put an ST506 controller into a PC. ST506/412 was the defacto
standard on PCs until IDE. although most PC people erroneously refer to
the cabling and interface as "MFM". The controllers used by IBM in the XT
were made by Xebec.
Once you have a controller and drive in your PC, you can write the code to
read and write sectors to be able to copy a drive.

--
It would be easier to use basic SCSI commands to talk to the S1410 controller
directly. I have the documentation on line, and as long as no other peripheral
is on the SCSI chain, it should work fine (SCSI is a superset of SASI)
When you write the copy program, remember to have some fallback strategy WHEN
you read a bad sector (filling with ascii "BAD SECT" for example) since you
may not get any data back.
You'll also need to figure out the disc geometry, sector length, etc. since
you have to set these parameters into the S1410 before you can do anything.
This may require some experimentation, but it isn't likely that they would
have used anything other than 128,256, or 512 bytes/sector.
the S1410 manual can be found at www.spies.com/aek/pdf/xebec/S1410Man.pdf

Received on Mon Aug 04 2003 - 14:49:00 BST