MFM, RLL etc to USB

Al Kossow aek at bitsavers.org
Wed May 25 11:54:08 CDT 2005


Anybody know if there exist adapters for old disk drives (e.g.- MFM, RLL
etc.) to USB?
Preferably USB 2.0. I may need to read the contents of a bunch of old 
hard
drives.  I can probably cobble together some old ISA systems with the 
right
controllers if I really must, but maybe someone's created a simple 
solution.

Chris

--

This same subject came up a month or so ago.

You have to use the same controller as the drive was formatted with, 
since there is no
way to tell what the actual on-disk sector format was for a random MFM 
or RLL disk.

Adaptec, for example, used their own ECC scheme on the sector.

There is (currently) nothing available like the Catweazel for capturing 
bit level data
for hard drives.



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