Date   : Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:33:50 +0100
From   : philb@... (Phil Blundell)
Subject: reading data from old hard disk

So, I have this old HDFS disk sitting on my desk and I thought it would
be interesting to try to retrieve the data from it.  It's a Fujitsu
M2235 with an MFM interface, so I thought it might be as straightforward
as plugging it into an MFM controller on my Linux machine and then
dumping the data off.  Obviously it turned out not to be quite that
easy, because the MFM controller and the internal IDE don't seem to
coexist very well (even when set to different ports) but I was able to
work around that by booting the machine off the network instead.

Now, though, I discover an additional problem: the disk is using
256-byte sectors whereas obviously the PC is set up to expect 512.  I
can modify the driver source easily enough but I'm not sure whether the
controller card itself can be made to work with 256 bytes per sector.
(I couldn't obviouslly find a datasheet for the controller IC with a few
minutes on Google.)

Any suggestions for how I might proceed with this?

thanks

p.