Date   : Mon, 01 Oct 2007 14:06:10 +0100
From   : julesrichardsonuk@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Acorn SCSI access / serial transfer

A while ago, someone on here had a code fragment for reading sectors from a 
disk hooked up via an Acorn SCSI board/Adaptec bridge to a BBC micro.

I *think* (hope) it was independent of ADFS - i.e. it used the code in the 
ADFS ROM to talk to the SCSI board, but it *didn't* require there to be an 
ADFS filesystem actually present on the disk.

I believe the only requirements were for the drive to have been formatted 
against the Adaptec (so it had the drive geometry info 'hidden' at the start 
of the drive where the Adaptec would find it at power-on) and for the sector 
size to be 256 bytes.

I suspect it was JGH - could be wrong. Can't find the message now though. :-(

Meanwhile someone else - Andrew B I think - had some code to dump the contents 
of a hard disk over the serial port, xfer-style, but I think this was tied to 
an ADFS filesystem rather than using raw sectors (Andrew / whoever, correct me 
if I'm wrong there).

It's become a bit of an urgency to get data off the four Adaptec-driven drives 
that I have (two are ADFS format, one's an Econet fileserver, and one from a 
256-bps RML fileserver) onto a PC - potentially I've got access to them for 
about 6 weeks, then they go into storage, then they're at the mercy of a 
shipping company, so backups would be rather nice!

I want to look into how complex it'll be to concoct something to grab raw 
sectors from the drive and spit them down a serial line at 9600 baud (19200 at 
a push!)  - probably quite trivial for someone who knows 6502 assembler or BBC 
BASIC, but that ain't me! ;)

I've got no interest in trying to interpret drive contents on the beeb side; 
all I need is a raw n-MB dump to end up on the PC, and I can pick apart the 
actual data there.

cheers

Jules