I've got drives back to Win3.11 living in boxes I bought on eBay. These can be stripped of useful data and bounced via a floppy to an XP machine for transmission to something current. I really don't have any very, very old Linux drives hanging around. The most modern OS that the dual drive 3.11 machine can handle would be w2000 or xp. I could probably put a tiny Linux partition somewhere. But why worry. W2k is enough for the Royal Navy! Simono On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 19:43 +0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote: > Hi Tim, > > > About your sector-dumping project: surely there must be a better way > > than using the parallel port? ;-) > > Well, there are worse ways. :-) The serial port is a lot slower, only > 19,200 baud on some of these machines; their Standard Parallel Port is > much quicker. > > Some of the drives are PATA IDE, so in theory I could move them to a > modern PC and dd(1) or gddrescue, but given others are ST506 interface > I'd have to find some other way for those anyway. And not disturbing a > drive that's been in place for some decades has its appeal; I'm > grateful if it spins up and accesses, let along survives a move to > another machine. > > On these old machines, it doesn't matter that the parallel port is SPP > and more or less uni-directional since under some of the operating > systems, e.g. AIX 3.2.5 on a POWER CPU, it would be practically > impossible to find out how to get enough access to the port to do > anything more complex. The one thing I probably can do is get eight-bit > bytes sent through unharmed. If I wrap the sectors with a frame, > address info, CRC, possibly FEC too, depending on what I can cook up in > BBC BASIC/ARM, then the Linux receiving end can work hard to come up > with the image. If there are bits that need resending, Linux can tell > me the addresses and I'll run the transfer again for just those areas, > IOW I'm the other direction of the laggy protocol. > > There's even the option of having a microcontroller be the "printer" and > just have it dump all data to a MultiMediaCard for when a PC can't be > nearby. Since there's no protocol to speak of, other than normal SPP, > the MCU doesn't have much to do, and wouldn't have knowledge of frames, > CRC, etc., it just records the "print-out". > > Anyway, that's my idea so far. It seems the least intrusive to the old, > fragile, systems. > > Cheers, > Ralph. > > > -- > Next meeting: Blandford Forum, Tuesday 2010-09-07 20:00 > http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ -- Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... > How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://bit.ly/4sACa
-- Next meeting: Blandford Forum, Tuesday 2010-09-07 20:00 http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ -- Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://bit.ly/4sACa
