I found an old HDD in the attic of the house I grew up in and I would like to get the data off it but that has been a bit of a challenge. (It came out of my long gone 486DX-33.)

The drive was made in 1991, years before ATA interface was standardized. According to the specs* I've found it has a first generation IDE (PC AT bus) interface. It has a 40-pin IDE interface that fits an ATA connector but modern machines can't see it. I checked and found that the pin-outs on the drive don't match the newer ATA spec, only very old IDE.

So it looks like the only way I can get data off this thing is to actually "build" (or find?) a 486 that has an ISA AT-bus interface that will read this drive. I have browsed eBay and it seems like I could piece together a system eventually but it is probably going to be a pain in the ass, especially finding the exact right ISA interface cards, right RAM modules and such.

Any alternate ideas? Ideal 'parts vendors'?

Thanks all.

*Drive Specs: Seagate 130 MB, 3200 RPM, 32K cache, AT bus - IDE mode 0 (no DMA), RLL(2,7)

5/12/2010 9:38:13 PM

at the risk of asking a dumb question... if the drive is almost 20 years old, what makes you think it's going to even work at all? why go to all that trouble?

5/12/2010 9:39:40 PM

Quote :

"at the risk of asking a dumb question..."

Actually I think that's a really good question.

Quote :

"if the drive is almost 20 years old, what makes you think it's going to even work at all?"

It spins up just fine and the head moves out of the park position and finds sector 0. That's half the battle. As long as the platters have stayed magnetized the data *should* still be there.

Quote :

"why go to all that trouble?"

Curiosity. And it seems like an interesting project, plus it will be easier now than it will be in 5 or 10 years.

5/12/2010 9:47:28 PM

this actually seems like it would be a pretty fun project.

5/12/2010 11:07:57 PM

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable-c.html

profit.

5/12/2010 11:21:06 PM

schools usually have ancient computers, maybe you should try a surplus sale

5/12/2010 11:51:05 PM

^^ if that's the cable he needs, i MIGHT have a couple lying around...i know which one that is, but i usually throw them out because of how old they are

eraser: in theory, as long as you use that cable, any motherboard with an IDE interface SHOULD read it just fine

i can check when i get home, if you want

5/13/2010 8:06:12 AM

Quote :

" this actually seems like it would be a pretty fun project."

5/13/2010 9:47:43 AM

Quote :

"eraser: in theory, as long as you use that cable, any motherboard with an IDE interface SHOULD read it just fine i can check when i get home, if you want"

That would be awesome! All of the cables I have are ATA spec.

It would be interesting if it all came down to the choice of cable. Yesterday I had a bit of confusion trying to figure out how common it was for ISA cards to support RLL 2,7 and such. As I recall my old 486 that was using this drive had what was always referred to as a "multifunction card" that drove the drive. It was an 8-bit ISA card with a floppy connector and IDE connector internally and a parallel port and joystick port externally.

5/13/2010 11:52:06 AM

this thread is interesting, report back with results.

5/13/2010 1:04:50 PM

what file system is the drive? fat16? fat? ext? I'd goto the good will or pawn shop and grab a tandy for $5

5/13/2010 1:25:47 PM

Whenever you find a 486 to play with, don't forget to push the Turbo button!

5/13/2010 3:12:26 PM

i once had a 486DX and then my friend got a 486DX2 and i was like oh damn.

5/14/2010 12:33:29 AM

my first computer in high school was a 386. first started to learn about hardware from Peter Norton




spent a lot of time and late nights in Borland Turbo C++



i still have all that code too. i made a pretty kickass tower of hanoi game, complete with automated solver


[Edited on May 14, 2010 at 11:43 AM. Reason : GOOD TIMES]

5/14/2010 11:41:03 AM

looked like this?

5/14/2010 7:14:17 PM

my first computer was 386 as well, most of my time was spent in GW-BASIC playing nibbler, but that was when i was like 10, you must be like 35 years old if you had a 386 in high-school

[Edited on May 15, 2010 at 2:58 PM. Reason : .]

5/15/2010 2:54:39 PM

hey I never said it was state of the art, I just said I had it

when I graduated I got a compaq presario with a P3, 256 MB RAM, 20 gig hard drive

[Edited on May 15, 2010 at 3:25 PM. Reason : I know y'all remember MMX]

5/15/2010 3:21:35 PM

I remember back in the day where I would use a razor blade and cut each 40 wire from the IDE ribbon cable then zip tie them up to improve air flow before they came out with rounded cables as a standard feature for modders. Must have been when I had my old 266a celeron with the banshee card.

5/15/2010 3:59:01 PM

Get an old Soundblaster card w/ the IDE controller, that should work with it.

As long as you have a free ISA slot.

5/16/2010 5:33:03 PM

I'll bust out my TIE Fighter CD-ROM and come over to play!

5/16/2010 8:41:24 PM

fuck yes, TIE Fighter was the SHIT

5/16/2010 9:11:07 PM

Quote :

"Get an old Soundblaster card w/ the IDE controller, that should work with it."

That's a good idea. On that topic, the one thing I still happen to have from my old PC is my Sound Blaster 16 MultiCD. Although it has 3 device connectors they only work for three different proprietary CD-ROM interfaces. It was such a bad-ass card. I even had the digital signal processor upgrade chip in the empty socket. IIRC it cost me $300 back then. Ahh, memories. I always wanted a WaveBlaster card to go with it. This of course was back before Creative started making crap.

Quote :

"I'll bust out my TIE Fighter CD-ROM and come over to play! "

Hell yeah; TIE Fighter was such an awesome game. I have it on floppy disk with the Campaign Disk add-on.

I discovered that I have an old Pentium II motherboard and CPU. It is a first-generation Pentium II board and has both ISA and PCI slots. I am wondering if it is old enough to work with the drive or maybe if the onboard controller doesn't work if maybe something like the Sound Blaster 16-IDE in an ISA slot would accept it. I don't have any RAM for it. I will see what type I need and go from there.

5/18/2010 3:21:10 PM

I actually have everything you would need to do this in my parents' attic, down to the sound card with an IDE controller. I used to go to school surplus auctions way back and buy up 2/3/486 machines and parts, and it just sort of accumulated. Next time I go there I'll see if I can pull a working one for the sake of vintage data recovery.

5/18/2010 3:41:25 PM

this thread kinda wants me to go to my parents house and dig up some of the old PC's. Pretty sure I still have sim city, wheel of fortune and dig on them.

5/18/2010 6:21:25 PM

Quote :

"I actually have everything you would need to do this in my parents' attic, down to the sound card with an IDE controller. "

Wow; kick ass. Keep me posted!

5/18/2010 8:40:51 PM

I dont think one of them sounds cards will support a hard drive, at least the one we had didn't.

Try running the drive on its own controller.

5/19/2010 10:48:47 AM

Quote :

"I dont think one of them sounds cards will support a hard drive, at least the one we had didn't."

Looking at the specs the IDE interface on the SB16 cards they definitely appear to be intended for CD-ROM drives.

Quote :

"Try running the drive on its own controller."

Do you have any suggestions for an independent controller that might handle it?

I am going to take my first stab at this using a first generation Pentium II system I am building (I have been able to find *most* of the parts I need). If the onboard IDE controller (Intel-branded motherboard) doesn't recognize it then I will need to try something else. IIRC the last time I tried booting this board years ago there was a POST error with the RAM I had so I might need to find some EDO somewhere ...

5/19/2010 4:55:18 PM

When i say own controller, what i mean is, don't have the drive set as a slave or master to another device.

Set it as a master, and put it at the end (not the middle) of the cable. and have the other end go right into the PC, have the middle connector unplugged.

It still might not autodetect, I'm sure how it communicates those facts to the controller, it may not have been standardized at the time the drive was made.

Im almost tempted to say try one of those ide ATA usb adapters, sometimes that cheap made in china crap has to support all kinda oddities.

Finally, you might have luck manually entering the information, ie dont rely on the motherboard to autodetect the drive, set it up set the transfer mode to like pio 0 or what not and manually enter the cyl head et cetera parameters in the computers bios.


[Edited on May 19, 2010 at 5:03 PM. Reason : dd]

5/19/2010 4:59:59 PM

Quote :

"Im almost tempted to say try one of those ide ATA usb adapters, sometimes that cheap made in china crap has to support all kinda oddities"

That was actually the first thing I tried. Basically what ended up happening was that I would supply DC power to the drive and it would spin up. With the USB adapter already connected I would connect the USB connector to a PC and the drive would instantly spin back down. No matter which USB controller I tried I got the same symptoms.

As a matter of fact the same thing happens when I connect the drive to a newer PC. The drive spins up and I can hear the heads undock and align (as usual). As soon as the controller tries to "talk" to the drive it promptly spins down.

I discussed this with a few people and one suggestion was that maybe the PCM was fried. I go on eBay and find an identical drive and buy it, figuring that I would swap the PCM (hey, in 1992 there weren't dozens of PCM versions for a single drive) if I needed to. I took the newly purchased drive and ran it through the same tests as my old one and it behaves the same exact way.

It definitely seems that the PCM on the drive is simply unable to talk to a newer drive controller. I have found references to people having similar problems online and the suggestion always comes back to "find an old PC."

As for the old PC, as I read through specs I am not entirely certain how a "PC AT"-era machine really talked to a drive. What I gathered (this could be totally wrong, please correct me if so) from some documents I read is that basically the drive interface card on an old PC would plug into an ISA slot and serve as a semi-direct link into the main system bus and that the PCM on the hard disk more or less handle communication. If so, then this is a bit different than modern-day drives in that now we have either logic in the southbridge chip or an independent chip on a PCI card that serves as the ATA controller and as a layer of abstraction between the drive and BIOS. BIOS asks the controller for information and the controller 'speaks for the drive' and delivers data to the running OS. BIOS and the OS itself don't really need to know anything about the drive itself, it's all handled by the controller. Back in the era of the hard drive being discussed it was necessary to usually manually configure BIOS with the drive parameters (Heads, Cylinders, Tracks) before the drive could be used, or at least used at full capacity or even used at all.

5/20/2010 1:39:12 PM

I have a mint 486 SX if it would be any use to you. I can't part with it though, it's special.

I recently threw away a 386 server and a 386 "portable" lunchbox system.

6/25/2010 12:35:36 AM

^I have two fully operating Tandy 1000TX computers that are complete and run. One of them is in the original box that it came in stored and the other one is setup in the shop and runs all the time. I may take a picture of it later.

But this does have me wondering where my 486DX2 with the famous Turbo switch is at. It was custom built by my neighbor before I was able to build them on my own. After that dad went Compaq (shit, died long time ago) Gateway (also probably dead) and a Dell or Gateway after that. I took the Gateway to school, but in my first year bought/built a computer from a TWWer. Have simply built my own PCs ever since.

[Edited on June 25, 2010 at 9:22 AM. Reason : ]

6/25/2010 9:21:44 AM