Research Data Recovery, OLD Drive, Help!

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TheChaoticFlame

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Basically, all I want to do is be able to install a hard drive as secondary and see if there's any way that I can attempt to recover data from it from an OS on a primary drive.

I'm open to other suggestions though, my professor needs the data on this drive.

It's not that easy though.

The drive is old, pre-IDE era. It's an MFM drive, Toshiba model # MK134FA-I
It connects to a motherboard via two cables into an ISA hard drive controller (which POST reports as being "good.") In fact, everything in this early/mid 80s system seems to be functional (incredibly) except for the hard drive, which reports "fail."

I need some way to either add another drive into the old system as primary and have the old drive as secondary, which seems unlikely since I don't have any of these MFM drives lying around, or to transplant the drive (and controller I guess) into another system that has an integrated hard drive controller and can support IDE.

For the sake of this, is it's old, assume I probably have one. I've tried simply moving the controller board into a windows 95 box and connecting the hard drive to it, (without modifying the configuration of the existing 2 drives) with no luck. Simply installing the drive controller in the ISA slot (without the hard drive even attached) causes BIOS to report floppy disk fail and primary hard drive failure. Removing the controller fixes this immediately.

Among other things, I'm a biology undergraduate, and I offered to try and do this for a professor who might be giving me a lab position. (Succeeding at this surely wouldn't hurt my chances of getting in.)
He said it was a 286. Hah! I wish. This thing has two processors, those old black chips that appear to soldered on to the motherboard. I'm not positive if they actually are, I'm not messing with them.

Any and all help is appreciated!
 
Does the drive still spin up? If it reported an error in the old machine chances are it will report the same error in another machine. I wouldn't even bother trying this myself unless I'm sure theres nothing wrong with the drive.

If you are sure the disk is functional, you need to do this:

1. Find drivers for the controller
2. Install DOS 6.x (or even older, depending on what the driver supports; Windows 95 will almost surely not work)
3. Adjust IRQ settings on the controller AND motherboard so you don't get conflicts ( you will probably have to disable some onboard devices like the floppy controller to make room)
4. Cross your fingers and pray to your deity ;)
 
Call a data recovery firm. They should be able to do a simple copy for a reasonable price.
 
We're a very small lab, with limited funding. My experience is that "reasonable" is $100+, and that's assuming that they don't actually have to remove the drive platters.

Considering that this is a 44mB drive with an archaic interface, IF there was even some place that I could locate with the equipment to deal with the drive intact, I doubt it would resemble affordability in cost.

In response to Lazn_Work, I guess you didn't read the whole post. I've already done that, it didn't work.

@ Xeth: I got almost identical advice from a friend of mine, and I intend to try it tomorrow. The drive sounds like it's spinning fine, it's horribly noisy, but it doesn't have that "click" that modern dead drives often make.

It sounds like I'm going to boot DOS from a floppy and see if I can access the drive from command line, and if so copy the files from there? I don't do any work in DOS any more, so I'm pretty rusty on my commands, but I'm even more confused as to how I'm going to copy files to a floppy if there's a floppy disk in it that I'm booting from.
 
Hello,

Wow, now that is a blast from the past. It has been a long time since I have worked on MFM hard disk drives. First, I really drought that the MFM controller will work in anything newer then a 286 (maybe a 386) style PC. If you still have a 286 class PC working, your should be able to boot the drive and use DOS to copy the data off to a floppy disk.

Your question about DOS - once you have booted the PC from a floppy disk drive, you can removed the floppy disk and insert a blank format floppy disk.
Then used the COPY command to copy the data from the hard disks drive to the floppy disk one floppy at a time.

For example: COPY c:\data.dat a:\data.dat (which says to copy a file name "data.dat" on the hard disk drive which is this case is "C" to the floppy disk drive keeping the same name).

FYI, I work at a university (system administrator) so I understand the prof. wanting to get that data. I still have get request once in a while to recover DATA from 25 year old 5.25 inch floppy disks which if they are still good I can usually succeed at.

If I can be more help, let me know.
~Dyslextic
 
Try to scan the drive with Spinrite 6.0. Then if possible, use Hard Drive Regenerator. Not sure if either program will read MFM type drives, but Spinrite has saved my ass many times on reading damaged drives. Hard Drive Regenerator is a program to help rebuild bad clusters. Also has worked for me. Good luck...
 
Are these programs that you boot from a floppy? Because otherwise, I'm not sure how you're suggesting that I run them.
 
Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't seem to get it to try booting from a floppy.
I downloaded a DOS 5.) Bootdisk from BootDisk.com, ran it to write to floppy, and put the floppy in the computer that I want to boot from it. No boot Device available.
Bios is about as simple as it gets, there's no option for setting boot order.

The only options are as follows:

Time:
Date: Thu Mar 17, 1994
Diskette A: 5.25 Inch, 1.2 MB
Diskette B: 3.5 Inch, 1.44 MB
Hard Disk 1: Type 48
Hard Disk 2: Not Installed
Base Memory: 640 KB
Extended Memory: 384 KB
Display: VGA/EGA
Keyboard: Installed
CPU Speed: Fast
Coprocessor: Installed

That's it. No second page. I tried setting the Hard Drive to Not Installed to suppress the error message about drive failure, but it still says "No Boot Device Available"

I guess I'm going to try some other boot disks... And if I HAVE to I might try making a 5.25 Floppy Boot disk...
 
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