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Pulling data from st-225

B

Beanburgh

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Jun 17, 2009
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Is there anyone out there (preferably close to Melbourne, Australia) who would be willing to pull data off a Seagate ST-225 HDD in exchange for keeping the drive?
I've got the two ribbon cable hanging the back of the drive but nothing else and the company doesn't want to source and old PC.

Thanks for your time and attention,

Beanburgh
 
Ole Juul said:
I he doesn't catch this thread later, try druid. I sounds like his bailiwick.
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Hell, you're closer to Australia than I am LOL

Yeah, I could probably do it as I have about a dozen different MFM controllers to try on it and I just keep changing them until something works.

Then I just dump the files to a Zip drive, bring the disk down to the den and burn it on to a CD.
 
Do a web search for a Western Digital "Winchester" 8 or 16 bit controller card. A known good WD part number is "WD-1002-WX1". This controller and a ST-225 have been operating on my Tandy 1000SX since about 1987. Another way to go would be a Seagate ST21M/ST22M if you have a 16-bit "AT" mobo.

If you wish, I can scan my Winchester (8-bit) user's guide, in a PDF format, and zap it out to you.
 
It's not clear that the OP even knows what controller was used with the original HD--or even if it was MFM (could be RLL). He hasn't even specified that it even came off a PC.

Like Dru says, it's going to be hit-and-miss on the controller with no guarantee of success.

Maybe we need a hard-disk Catweasel...
 
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Stacker & DoubleSpace

Stacker & DoubleSpace

I don't know if the ST-225 was a good candidate for RLL encoding, but another problem in retreiving the data, if the system was used into the 90's, would be data compression if the system was upgraded to DOS 6.0 and used something like Stacker or Doublespace. DOS 6.0 came out around 1993.
 
dave_m said:
I don't know if the ST-225 was a good candidate for RLL encoding
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Definitely not. In general, trying to format MFM drives to RLL is a bad idea, and on ST-225s, it's almost guaranteed to fail. You might have better luck with high-end drives like Maxtors or Miniscribes, but not Seagates.
 
I had 2 st-225s formatted as RLL for my Tandy 1000a. I personally didn't have any problems for years running that configuration for personal use.
 
The capability of a drive to support RLL varied from drive to drive. The 225Rs tried to improve on the odds by using a thin-film coating, but it wasn't unusual that a plain 225 could be found to support the 7.5MHz RLL(2,7) data rate. I wonder if late-manufacture 225 drives weren't the same as the 225R in any case.

Back to the original point--if you don't know the controller, you've got a big problem. Aside from the RLL issue, encoding of address marks, ECC polynomials, etc. varied from manufacturer to manufacturer. An MFM drive is as dumb as a stump--it doesn't care much about what the raw data stream looks like--it's the controller's job to make sense of that.

Compression, file systems, etc. are a secondary layer on top of the basic encoding. Worst case, as long as individual sectors can be read, one can make an image of the drive and work with that.

But suppose the hard drive in question was used on a Cromemco system. No sectoring at all--each track is a 10K uninterrupted data stream. No PC controller will handle that.
 
kb2syd said:
I had 2 st-225s formatted as RLL for my Tandy 1000a. I personally didn't have any problems for years running that configuration for personal use.
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Seagate never certified the ST-225 for RLL encoding and if used for RLL, Seagate would not honor the warranty. After they perfected the ST-225R, they used that design for both models but still never certified the ST-225 for RLL as they tested it with MFM encoding.

If you used a late model ST-225, it would most likely work with RLL encoding but you would have been on your own if it did not.
 
Fallo said:
Definitely not. In general, trying to format MFM drives to RLL is a bad idea, and on ST-225s, it's almost guaranteed to fail. You might have better luck with high-end drives like Maxtors or Miniscribes, but not Seagates.
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Seagate's early stepper motor designs were not optimum for RLL. However newer head positioning designs solved the problem.
 
dave_m said:
Seagate never certified the ST-225 for RLL encoding and if used for RLL, Seagate would not honor the warranty. After they perfected the ST-225R, they used that design for both models but still never certified the ST-225 for RLL as they tested it with MFM encoding.

If you used a late model ST-225, it would most likely work with RLL encoding but you would have been on your own if it did not.
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Yeah, I knew I was out on my own on the Tandy 1000A. I made so many "field engineering" changes to this machine that NOTHING was covered I'm sure. Then again, I never had any problems with it.

I had 3 external floppy drives. 2 5.25 and 1 3.5. I used an old printer switch to select either 3.5 or 5.25 drive A. I had 2 external st-225's running on an RLL controller. I had an EGA card stuffed in there and a debug routine that would activate it. I had a aftermarket multifunction card for memory, clock, serial and a second parallel. I had an 8087 installed for doing some ground water modelling calculations. What a difference that made. I then went to an 80286 accelerator card. For day to day use the 286 was great, but for the groundwater modelling the 8087 was still faster by far. There wasn't an option for an 80287 on the accelerator card.

Man I miss that machine. What a mess of wires.
 
Quite a system. I don't think I've ever seen a system configured with three floppies on one controller. The parallel switch was a nifty idea. I almost forgot about the 8087 math co-proscessor. It did speed up floating point intensive applications.
 
dave_m said:
Quite a system. I don't think I've ever seen a system configured with three floppies on one controller. The parallel switch was a nifty idea. I almost forgot about the 8087 math co-proscessor. It did speed up floating point intensive applications.
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I'm nout sure I made this clear enough. It was only 2 floppies at a time. Either 2 5.25" or 1 3.5 and 1 5.25. I guess I've wandered off topic far enough.
 
Beanburgh said:
Is there anyone out there (preferably close to Melbourne, Australia) who would be willing to pull data off a Seagate ST-225 HDD in exchange for keeping the drive?
I've got the two ribbon cable hanging the back of the drive but nothing else and the company doesn't want to source and old PC.Beanburgh
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I'm in Melbourne and have a good range of 8 and 16 bit PC controllers.
I'll take you up on your offer, and will email you.
 
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