Help me connect a 20 yr old hard drive.

February 1, 2008 5:04 PM

Old Computer Filter: I was cleaning out a few boxes the other day from my closet and found my ST-251-1 MFM drive that I had in my first IBM based PC. It had a whopping 40MB. Even though I know it may not boot up after all this time, I still can't help but wonder if it will and would love a chance to see a snapshot of what I was doing computer-wise in 1986. Does anyone in the Hivemind know if there is an adapter/card/whatever to plug an old MFM drive into IDE or USB?
posted by damiano99 to computers & internet (13 comments total)

I did a little bit of googling to no end, but it seems like it might be easier and possibly cheaper to send it to a data recovery place. Assuming that the drive is still healthy, data recovery specialists should have the hardware for this. Here's a place that sells MFM/RLL drives as well as doing data recovery, so they probably have the setup for this.

It shouldn't cost a zillion dollars like recovery costs for dead or broken drives. You just want to copy some files.
posted by rhizome at 5:34 PM on February 1, 2008

I think the only hard part will be finding an MFM controller card to connect to the drive. I see them for sale online for $50 or so.

You'd need drivers for the card. Likely to be for a version of DOS that dates to the time of Christ.

Then you'd just need an old computer. Seems like you should be able to get an old 8086 at a Flea Market, with 8 bit ISA slots.


The hard parts, I think, will be getting drivers for the controller and, optionally, getting the data OFF the drive onto newer media. If you don't mind just peeking at the files on whatever ancient computer you can dig up, it shouldn't be THAT hard.

If it were me, before I did anything else, I would try to just get the drive to spin up. Presumably, like drives of today, it has separate power and IO connectors, and takes 12v DC. If you could just apply power to it using a bench power supply and some alligator clips, it would be good to know whether there's any mechanical life left in it. Old components can sometimes die a sad death when you first try to give them some juice after many years lying dormant. No sense in assembling all the other stuff if the drive won't even spin.
posted by autojack at 5:48 PM on February 1, 2008

I'd check for a ham-radio club in your area. I bet you'd run into someone who would love to blow the dust off an old 286 and pull off the data (Interlnk/Intersrv it to a more modern machine) in exchange for a case of beer.
posted by Perplexer at 5:49 PM on February 1, 2008

Er, sorry I contradicted myself and didn't edit : ) I think the hardest part will be the software/driver issue, NOT finding an MFM card.
posted by autojack at 5:49 PM on February 1, 2008

I have an original IBM PC/XT sitting here which maybe will read your drive. Email's in my profile if you're in western US - wouldn't make much sense if you're further off. (40 MB! Wow, must be a late model! Mine's 10 MB.)
posted by anadem at 5:53 PM on February 1, 2008

easiest way to do it is (to pretty much echo the above) go get yourself an old 8088/286-era machine with a MFM hard drive and plug yours in. you can hook your existing drive into the power on your desktop to see if the drive spins up properly - note that some of those old Seagates (like the one you have) may have stiction problems if it's been sitting for awhile, so, if it does, I wouldn't try to force it if it won't spin up immediately.

(stiction happens on some older drives; the heads actually get stuck to the platters. new drives lock the heads away from the platters, but old ones - even up through IDE days - don't. you can sometimes get it to go again by sharply twisting the drive on a plane when it tries to spin up. that's obviously not good for it, so you want it hooked to something that can get the data off if you do it.)

I'd be very surprised if you find an MFM-to-IDE or MFM-to-USB (or, even, MFM-to-PCI) adapter - MFM wasn't really much of a standard. today's drives are really more-or-less small computers that control heads and encode data for writing and all that on their own (I've actually had a few IDE drives that had 8086 chips on them faster than what I had in my PC back in the day). MFM and RLL drives and such mostly had enough circuitry to translate the pulses coming from the computer into pulses that moved the heads on the disk just right - the MFM controller card had a lot to do with making sure the drive's heads were positioned correctly and with what actually came out of the head when you tried to save your files. (you used to actually be able to get something like 30% more capacity out of an MFM drive by hooking it to an RLL controller - MFM and RLL really just refer to how the data is actually written to the disk, and RLL writes denser.) IDE's been around for a long, long time and is a lot easier to build a card for. with MFM/RLL, you gotta tell it how many heads and cylinders and platters and where all the defects on the drive are and all that before the controller can find any of that data you saved to it.

if you go get an old computer to get your stuff off, you might want to look up what the BIOS type and/or the geometry of that drive is. ST-251s were pretty popular (the seek noise they make is pretty awesome, fwiw) and data on them should be pretty easy to find. fwiw, most of the support for that's in the BIOS of the computer and the BIOS on the card itself - it's pretty plug and play once you get the drive configured in the system. most computer BIOSes (even up through the 486 days) had a spot to configure what drive you had - you just enter the numbers and drop the card in.
posted by mrg at 9:31 PM on February 1, 2008

side question ... will you have applications to open the files on the system? Old lotus 123 and wordperfect files may be somewhat useless without their corresponding applications.
posted by jannw at 1:51 AM on February 2, 2008

Linux, even 2.6.x kernels. can talk to MFM controllers. Googling for "mfm controller" will get you a raft of sites selling old ones. So now getting an ISA slot is the hard part.

How about this: USB to ISA interface (ie plug an ISA bus into a USB port). Seems to be what you need.
posted by 5MeoCMP at 4:18 AM on February 2, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Try messaging Jim at oldskool.org - he's a really nice and knowledgable old-skool PC freak like myself! He most likely has the equipment you need, or at least he could pull the data off.
posted by rc55 at 6:21 AM on February 2, 2008

Single ISA slots were available as a backwards-compatability option on economy machines as recent as the Socket 7 chipset... Heck, I've got a HP Pavilion 4533 kicking around under my desk that boots. Totally findable.
posted by Orb2069 at 9:06 AM on February 2, 2008

I doubt highly there is a USB connector.

My old skool computer knowledge says that you shouldn't need drivers. After all, the computer boots off of a hard drive, and that's way before there's any drivers loaded.

Do you just want to boot the thing up on a PC to see what's up? That shouldn't be a problem. PCs are backward compatible to a ridiculous degree. Anything that worked on an AT should boot on anything today.

Your plan should be:

1) Plug it into a computer power adapter and see if it spins up and/or doesn't sound funny.

2) Find a computer as new as possible that has ISA slots (I've got one in back that's a Pentium III 750 that still has ISA slots, so it shouldn't be hard at all).

2a) I say newest so that it will have a decent version of Windows (or Linux if that's your bag) on it that will be easily networkable so that if the drive works you will be able to get data off if you want.

3) Obtain MFM controller card and cables. There were two card edge style cables of slightly different size that connected it up. A controller cable and a data cable.

3b) The most important thing: you need to be able to configure that drive controller for the hard drive. It might have a BIOS that pops up and lets you specify the Cylinders, Heads and Sectors number that's written on the drive's label. Or, more horrifyingly, it will need to be configured via a DOS boot floppy with a config program on it.

3c) Being ISA, it will also have to be configured for its interrupt. If you want it to boot, make it interrupt 14. If you want it to be secondary, make it 15. I think.

4) Once you've done all that, it should boot.

If it boots and you see any files you need, set it to secondary and let the modern OS boot. The drive should just appear as a drive letter. Or mount it as necessary.
posted by gjc at 10:40 AM on February 2, 2008

I think the hardest part will be the software/driver issue, NOT finding an MFM card.

IIRC, Win95 - and probably 98 - had a driver for MFM/RLL controllers. I've got a sneaking suspicion Win2k did too? Failing that, a small DOS boot partition (on a USB stick?) should do the trick - no drivers required; the machine BIOS should see & relocate the BIOS on the controller card; you just set the drive parameters through the BIOS (usually, as gjc mentions in 3b above), and the rest is done through the standard int 13h interrupt handler.
posted by Pinback at 5:30 PM on February 2, 2008

In case above does not work, my first disk was MFM with an Adaptec MFM to SCSI controller. Don't know if they still exist. Also have ancient computers sitting around, hit me up third or so if needed.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:48 PM on February 2, 2008