Ancient Hard Drive

July 19, 2006 7:33 AM

I'm having trouble getting files off an ancient hard drive using an enclosure. Help!

I have a 170 MB hard drive that came out of my old 386 beige box. This box was running some version of DOS and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. I'm trying to use a USB/Firewire enclosure to mount the drive and get my old files. I'm having trouble getting either my Mac or my XP box to recognize the drive.

I've hooked the drive up the enclosure without a problem. I boot up XP, and a "Safely Remove Hardware" icon shows up in my system tray. However, when I go to "My Computer", no additional drives show up.

If I double-click the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon and check the "Display device components" check box, the computer appears to have correctly identified/recognized the drive as a "Quantum ELS170A USB Device".



However, if I go to Drive Properties and click on the Volumes
tab, the Type and Status are unknown.



The drive shows up in the Device Manager,



but doesn't show up in the Storage area of the Computer manager (image too large for inline)

The drive only has three jumper prongs. When I tried a jumper in either position the drive wouldn't even power up.

When I tried the enclosure in my Mac (OS X 10.4), I got an alert saying it "didn't recognize the drive, would I like to format it?"

I booted the 386 up before I took the drive out, and it was working fine. I have no idea how it's formated, I assume FAT16 but my old college roommate would know better than me.

I tried a less-old 20 GB hard drive in the enclosure and it worked fine.

If anyone has any ideas, or can tell me "You're horkred because ...",I'd appreciate it.

posted by alan to computers & internet (8 comments total)

What kind of connection is it? IDE? I don't remember how old that is (I can't remember what my long dead 386 had. I assume it used the same cable, as you were able to get the drive into the enclosure). My first guess is that your USB enclosure is not aware of how to deal with such old hardware -- it has to translate between USB and ATA/IDE, which won't work if the drive speaks a control protocol the enclosure does not understand.

But that's just a guess. Can you boot your WinXP machine, and try a Knoppix bootable Linux CD? Maybe it can mount it. Linux folks tend to be serious pack-rats when it comes to allowing ancient hardware to work.

Or what about ditching the enclosure for now, and putting the drive it right in your WinXP box? Maybe that would make a difference? I'd probably try that with a Knoppix CD, if I were you.

Failing that, put it back in the 386, find a networking stack for DOS, and copy them to a newer machine via the network (scp is, I assume, ported to DOS?). I'm sure you can get this method to work, but I suspect it might be an epic journey.

Just guessing, really.
posted by teece at 8:13 AM on July 19, 2006

I was in a similar situation a few weeks back, and I found that on an XP box the USB case wouldn't work and the only way I could get my old drive to work was to install it as a slave inside the PC case. If you do this, make sure that your bios is set up to recognize an additional drive.

As for the jumpers, the specs I found for this drive say if it's the only drive, DS should be jumpered; if it's master in a multi-drive system, SP and DS should be jumpered; if it's a slave, there should be no jumpers.

Full specs for your drive (and a few others) are available on page 109 of this obscure, lengthy pdf file.
posted by SteveInMaine at 8:51 AM on July 19, 2006

IDE/ATA showed up around the mid 80s, so I should be ok there. This is going to sound naive, but if the cable fits and it was chained to the two floppies in the case, it's IDE/ATA, right?

The bootable Linux CD is a good idea, I'll download a few distributions and give that a go.

My XP box doesn't belong to me, and since something breaks every time I open a computer I think I'll skip that idea for now.

The old 386 was recycled in a fit of clearing old crap out of my place. I'd gone down trying to pull the data off while the drive was in the computer, but the floppy drive was bad, the computer had no CD-ROM, and something was wonky with the serial port. This box was a one hundred and thirty year old man who'd been tied to his chair in a nursing home. Without the pee.

My thoughts are the file system is something weird and archaic that's not FAT16…but like I said, I left that to the geek next door.

Thanks for the suggestions, and if anyone else has any ideas, keep 'em coming.
posted by alan at 9:06 AM on July 19, 2006

Steve wins the ancient manual contest. Where'd you find that thing? (subtitle: Alan should probably pay attention to PDF links in google searches).

Two votes for putting it in a windows box...I don't like the looks of this.

Thanks for the feedback Steve.
posted by alan at 9:23 AM on July 19, 2006

Maybe the drive has been formatted without a partition table, and the file system just takes up the whole physical drive.

Boot a Trinity Rescue Kit CD, and try these commands:

sfdisk --dump

This will show you all the partitions defined on all accessible disk devices. /dev/sda is where your USB enclosure will probably be, so if there's a partition table on the drive, you'll see it listed. I'm guessing there won't be one.

Assuming there's no partition table, try mounting the whole drive:

mount -o ro /dev/sda /mnt0
mount

If my guess is right, the first mount command should succeed quietly, and the second will show you (among other things) what filesystem exists on your drive. If so,

ls /mnt0

should show you a bunch of files.

Once you can see the files, you can copy them to your Windows drive like so:

captive-install-acquire

This will offer to scan your Windows disk to find the Windows DLL's it needs to do NTFS filesystem access from Linux. You should hit Y to the first prompt (quick scan), then D for Done to the next one.

mountallfs -c

This is a Trinity Rescue Kit script that scans your machine looking for mountable partitions, and then mounts them. The -c flag tells it to use the Captive filesystem driver that you used the previous step to set up, on any NTFS partitions it finds.

Assuming your main Windows partition is the first partition on the first IDE drive, it will get mounted as /hda1; then

cp -av /mnt0 /hda1/olddisk

will copy all the files from the old disk to a folder on the new one, and

umountallfs
umount /mnt0
reboot

will get you back into Windows to play.
posted by flabdablet at 9:50 AM on July 19, 2006

Oh yeah. If the mount commands don't succeed, go straight to reboot, and find a machine that you *are* willing to open, and temporarily install the drive as an IDE slave.
posted by flabdablet at 9:54 AM on July 19, 2006

That looks like a pile of awesome flabdablet. I'll give it a try asap.
posted by alan at 10:01 AM on July 19, 2006

Some wonderful drive specs:

Model: els170at (A scsi version was available)
Seek: 17ms
Cache: 32k
RPM: 3363
Interface: 1,7 RLL

Things have come a long way...
posted by Leenie at 10:21 AM on July 19, 2006