Date   : Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:33:02 +0100
From   : bbcmailinglist@... (Ian Wolstenholme)
Subject: reading data from old hard disk

There's nothing in the MDFS manual about compatibility with the FDFS/HDFS
but I'd be a bit surprised if there wasn't a way of doing it somehow.  I
can't really think that SJ Research didn't have a way of importing data on
HDFS discs if you upgraded to an MDFS, apart from archiving it to 400
floppy discs and restoring it to the new system!

Like you say, though, the MDFS does use 512 byte sectors and it appears
that the HDFS uses 256 byte sectors.  That would make it easier to read it
on a Beeb though with a host adapter and a bridge board like an Adaptec
or Xebec one.  The data won't be an ADFS filesystem but you ought to
be able to read off sectors with the OSWORD calls.

Best wishes,


Ian

----- Original Message -----
From: Phil Blundell [mailto:philb@...]
To: bbcmailinglist@...
Cc: bbc-micro@...
Sent: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:32:05 +0100
Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] reading data from old hard disk

On Tue, 2009-06-23 at 22:55 +0100, Ian Wolstenholme wrote:
> If it's from an HDFS, can it not be connected up to the MDFS somehow?

Not easily, I don't think.  

The M2235 disk uses an ST-506 interface and is presumably formatted with
256-byte sectors since this is what its documentation seems to assume.
The MDFS uses a SCSI interface and, I think, expects 512-byte sectors.

Even leaving aside the sector size problem, you'd need to find a bridge
board that would interface ST-506 to SCSI (not SASI) and that was
completely transparent, without needing the host to send any special
initialisation sequence.  I'm not sure if such things exist or not.

p.