Weird ancient hard drive - how can I read its data?

[cdd]

Hi

I have a very old hard drive called a Seagate ST-125 (that's the model number), and it has really weird connections I've never seen before in my life. A few photos:





Having had zero experience with such early 90s technology, I thought I would refer to the wonderful Metropol community to tell me what I need to explore its data on (and copy the data to) a computer.

The original computer it was in, btw, didn't have any modern looking I/O ports, even the keyboard port was absolutely huge (and the keybord itself weighed about as much as a laptop does). So that computer is long gone I'm afraid, if it was necessary to read the data.

Anyone with expereince with ancient computers have any tips? I'd be very grateful, as the contents are very sentimental.

Thanks

Chris

[Pete]

chris, i hope you don't mind but I changed your images to links as they were too big for the site design. Really must have a fiddle with the settings one day.

[cdd]

chris, i hope you don't mind but I changed your images to links as they were too big for the site design. Really must have a fiddle with the settings one day.

I've ensmallened then now. I thought the conversion was automatic it was so fast!

[Sput]

Looks as though it may be from the days of specific controller cards
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/maus.h ... 18712e4a9f

[jjames]

Looks like an old MFM/RLL drive to me.

The only way you are going to get that to work is either (a) transfer the controller card (which will be an 8-bit ISA most likely) to a newer PC with EIDE ports (hell on earth to configure as it will be non-plug and play), or (b) get an ISA super-IO card from somewhere and plug into the old PC and transfer the data across that way.

You could of course (if the original PC still works) plug an ISA network adaptor into the old PC and *hope* that it's recognised (you'll be after a Novell NE1000 or NE2000 or one of its clones). With a suitable DOS bootdisk you should be able to network this to a newer PC and transfer the data across.

Chances of getting a modern controller card to fit that HDD = nil.

[jjames]

The standard's name (after a bit of searching -- I'd forgot) is ST-506...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST-506

As with any drive made prior to about 1992, you'll need full details of the drive's head-count, interleave settings etc. If you do want to transfer the data to an IDE drive you may need to get hold of a smallish drive (don't remember the exact limit, it may be 32Mb or 128Mb), as the old PC's BIOS may not be able to handle anything larger.

[cdd]

Wow - thanks for all that information. Sadly the PC (an old Vanilla machine) is long, long gone.

Is the controller card part of the hard disk (i.e. I have it) or somewhere in the original computer (i.e. I don't have it)? All I have is what is pictured, sadly.

[jjames]

On the original computer unfortunately I didn't read that the machine was toast the first time through

If you buy a second-hand ST506 or ST412 controller card you *might* be able to get it to work. I say *might*, because although there were 101 different cards that were electrically compatible, occasionally drives would need to be (low-level) formatted before they would work on the new card.

I know all this stuff because I went through it myself at work about 8 or 9 years ago when an old commsserver died. The (286 I believe) machine was already ancient. We got it going again but in the end decided to replace it with an old P75 from stores.

[cwathen]

The Seagate ST125 has a formatted capacity of just 20MB and a data transfer rate of 625 Kbps. You are (partly) in luck in that at least you'll be able to power it from a modern system due to the standard 4-pin power connector.

If it contains data from the machine's glory days it's probably formatted using the FAT12 filing system and contains a copy of MS-DOS 3.3 or 4.0. Probably some interesting stuff on it, but it's highly unlikely you'll be able to get it to work again.

Today, a hard drive is a self contained unit where the drive mechanism and controlling electronics are all in the one package. In the past, the two were separated. There was a controller card containing the electronics necessary to operate the hard drive and the mechanism itself which was totally reliant on the controller to drive it. Hard drives were generally sold either as a 'hard card' (a gigantic 15 inch long expansion card containing the drive electronics and mechanism itself on a circuit board which plugged into an expansion slot) or as matched pairs of controller and mechanism (a specific controller card with drive details hard coded to the exact specification of the mechanism supplied with it). Even if you can get hold of the necessary ST412 controller card, it might not be compatible with the particular mechanism you have. And even if you do find a match, you'll need a PC old enough to have an 8-bit ISA slot to plug it in to - you'll need to go back about 15 years to find something with this slot - and of course then be faced with the issue of how to get the data onto another format - a backup to floppies might well be the only option for many machines.

Even if you get the electronics fired up, remember that a hard drive is ultimately a mechanical device storing data in magnetic form. The chances of the drive mechanism itself still working properly after years of gathering dust are very low. Quite possibly the only way to get data off of the drive is to send it away to a company specialising in it, there's little realistic chance of you're being able to get the drive working now.

If you want some hope though, I have in my collection an Amstrad PC2086S with a 20MB Western Digital hardcard which still sort of works (when you first power it on it doesn't recognise the disk, you then need to leave the machine powered on with the hard drive spinning for about 10 minutes before restarting it at which point it will recognise the disk and work) and an IBM PS/2 Model 50 with a 20MB Maxtor ESDI hard drive (ESDI started to move some of the electronics onto the mechanism itself, and provided better standardisation between controller and mechanism) which has numerous bad sectors but will still boot up.

[cdd]

Thanks for all your advice - actaully the drive was working like a charm only about a year ago, I had the computer which it was connected to browsing the files. I foolishly imagined I would have no need for the actual computer and so removed what I thought was the entire hard drive assembly and dumped the computer.

Really regretting that now... but the hard drive itself, I imagine, is in OK condition. You are right that a specialist may be the way to go, although I did some quick Googling and couldn't see anywhere at first glance that looked like it would be able to provide what I need, getting data off legacy hardware...

It has MS Dos, Word Perfect and some program called LapLink installed on it - I know that for a fact.

[Nick Harvey]

Now, if I'm not mistaken, LapLink is a very old program for transferring data from the hard drive on one machine onto the hard drive of another. You used it in conjunction with a 'printer type' cable from the parallel port on one machine to the parallel port on the other.

If only you'd LapLinked the contents of the drive across just before you dumped the old machine in the skip.

You got it wrong, cdd!