Copying ST251-1 drive to newer IDE?

[uriahsky]

I just acquired a old piece of test equipment from the 1990's. It is called a Protech PL5000 and it was made to test circuit boards and components in-circuit. It has sat on a shelf for the past twenty years. It runs on a 286 and has a ST251-1 in it. I would like to update the drive to something newer so that I have more features and access and longevity.
How do I get all of the info off of the drive? The Protech only has a 5.25 floppy and I have no discs at the moment. Is there a way to plug this into a newer computer that also has an IDE drive and windows and I can just drag and drop the files over? Is there an adapter that can go from this to IDE? Or any other way to get the info off of it?

And, What is best drive and controller to put into this 286? Can I do a newer IDE drive and will anyone work with a IDE controller?

Last question.

I would like to maybe update the 286 into something newer. This is one of the industrial kind of machines with the real long cards and ten or more back planes. I guess I will need a motherboard that has a large number of ISA slots 8 and 16bit. What is the best fit for something this old as far not being too fast but being compatible so that the test cards work. Pentium OK, 486? I am not sure what is made and what is not too expensive.

Thanks for the help,
Russ

 

[pearce_jj]

Re ST-251-1 is, either port it and it's controller to another computer (with ISA slots, obviously) that also has an IDE header, for example a Pentium class machine, maybe P-III, and use a disk imaging utility to transfer the contents drive-to-drive at the block level, or the other way around. The former might be safer?

Finally to get the old machine running from an IDE drive, pick up a 16-bit IDE ISA controller from your prefered auction site.

Why upgrade it though? It may have highly custom software on it hard-coded to work at whatever clock speed it's 286 is running at, would be my concern.

 

[Pepinno]

If such a machine was to fall into my hands, I would clean it to mint condition, and then keep it as "stock" and "vintage" as possible. I would not upgrade the hard disk nor the CPU.

The full sector-by-sector backup of the hard disk drive is a good idea, though.

 

[uriahsky]

Thank you,
I want to do the backup for sure because this software is almost non existent. I thought I would do a upgrade to a faster CPU so that the machine will be faster. I just didn't want to find that it is too fast. I found a few motherboards with PCI and ISA so I might get one of those along with a IDE ISA HD controller card they didn't seem to be too expensive. Thanks for the help. This doesn't sound too hard. I will probably keep the original parts but I do plan on using it for repairs. It is still has some impressive features even for it's age.
Russ