Replacements for ST-406/ST-512 drives

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Mon Feb 7 05:51:12 2005

On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 19:04 +0000, Tony Duell wrote:
> A second problem is low-level formatting these hard drives. Some machines
> don't seem to have the software to do it, and just about every controller
> has its own format.
>
> You mentioned the HPIB drive boxes. I use an HP9133 (I forget the suffix
> letter, its a 20Mbyte one in the more modern, smaller, box) on my
> Integral. Althoguh the drive mechanism is a standard ST225, I can tell
> you from experience that putting a 'blank' ST225 in there just causes it
> to turn on the fault light. Whether there is some way to get the unit to
> do an LLF, whether you need a different firmware EPROM, or what, I don't
> know. But I jaut hope that disk keeps on working.

How hard would it be for someone far more competant than me to rig
something up to just sample the data stream from such a drive and save
it to some form of modern media?

Forget needing to understand/read/modify the raw saved data for the
moment - the important thing is actually having the data outside of a
drive which could fail at any point.

Given the raw stream, make/model of drive, and (where necessary, if just
knowing the machine isn't enough) make/model of controller to which it
was attached, would that be enough for someone to stand a reasonable
chance of interpreting the data at some later date?

If so, it's better than nothing right now. This of course assuming that
sampling the data is the easy bit and interpretation/playback is the
hard part!

cheers

Jules
Received on Mon Feb 07 2005 - 05:51:12 GMT