Replacements for ST-406/ST-512 drives

[Tony Duell]

> 
> On Mon, 7 Feb 2005, Scott Stevens wrote:
> 
> > You, of course, need to be able to get the drive physically attached to
> > a Linux/whatnot system with the dd command available.  This might not
> > work in many instances with ST-506 or proprietary controllers.  Works
> > great with SCSI though.
> 
> As far as I know, Linux can handle MFM drives.

You probanly mean ST506-interfaced. MFM is an encoding scheme for the 
data on the drive, as I've said before it would be perfectly correct to 
talk about a SCSI MFM drive, al;though few people would (Since the data 
is encoded/decoded inside the drive in that case, you only care about the 
encoding scheme if you have to fix the thing!)

Linux certainly supports the PC/AT ST506 controller (it supports IDE, 
which is much the same thing to software). I think it also supports the 
PC/XT ST506 controller (or it certainly used to).

There are plenty more ST506 controllers out there that are 
format-incompatible with those. I'd love to see a standard PC controller 
with _any_ software make sense of a PERQ 2T2 hard drive (this thing has, 
for example, 4 words of filesystem info in the sector headers)

-tony