California Need recovery attempt on SCSI-II 1GB drive that was used on a Windows 3.1 system over 20 years ago

[PRC]

The controller was an Adaptec. Offering $100 but that is negotiable. There was only one small file that I need to recover.
San Francisco bay area

 

[ajacocks]

Hello, @PRC , and welcome to the forum. You’re looking for help recovering a single file from a SCSI HDD, correct? Do you know if you used any formatting software other than DOS, or any drive overlay software?

- Alex

 

[PRC]

As far as I can remember, I had a consultant set the drive up. Probably it was done in the simplest manner possible, using whatever software Adaptec provided.

 

[twolazy]

I can recover your data, but sadly live in chicago area. Would you be willing to ship the drive or would you prefer someone local?

 

[Chuck(G)]

The controller doesn't really matter--just about any SCSI controller with the correct interface (e.g. SE, LVD, whatever) will do the job. Similarly, I don't believe that drive overlays were used on SCSI drives.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Similarly, I don't believe that drive overlays were used on SCSI drives.

I have vague bad memories that some SCSI controllers for DOS used oddball partitioning software or other such oddities that might matter if you wanted to *boot* the drive, but it's been too long for me to be even remotely specific. But yeah, electrically it shouldn't be an issue for any SCSI controller to read it. (Unlike, say, ST506 drives.) Unless it's a really edge case I would guess your typical Linux distribution should be able to figure it out and mount the drive as long as the drive isn't corrupt/broken. Back in the day I did all kinds of cross-platform drive alchemy with Linux and a 2940UW.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Yes, various controller manufacturers had their own drivers and partitioning for SCSI drives. None of this, of course, prevents one from doing a simple block-by-block copy of the drive.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

None of this, of course, prevents one from doing a simple block-by-block copy of the drive.

Of course. Just noting that since the OP wants a single file off it if it did use some weird partition label for the DOS partition that might be a minor extra hassle when it comes to digesting the data dump. But unlikely to be that big of a problem, yeah.

(And doing a full block copy prior to doing anything else would definitely be a good idea anyway. If you did end up having to hack a partition label or something it'd be way better to do it on your binary copy.)

 

[twolazy]

I figured I do a dump, then load the dump into software and see whats up. Most likely would start with ghost, since its what I use most. And I would not charge 100 dollars! lol

 

[g4ugm]

First, I would not use GHOST as it re-organizes the data. Search for "Forensic Imaging Software" whiuch does take a bitwise image

 

[Chuck(G)]

Fer heaven's sake, just boot any old version of Linux (or even Unix) and do a dd on the physical drive.

 

[mbbrutman]

Agreed. This is not complicated. Do a DD first to image the drive. Then use Linux to look at the partition table and try mounting the partitions from within the image using the RO (read-only) and loopback options of mount.

That gets you everything, including hidden files, deleted files, data in the slack space on clusters, etc.

 

[PRC]

I can recover your data, but sadly live in chicago area. Would you be willing to ship the drive or would you prefer someone local?

I am OK with shipping it. Just let me know where.
The model is GD 31050.
The most I could find for a manual was at

csc :: CSC Hard Drive Bible 7th Edition 1994 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

From the bitsavers.org collection, a scanned-in computer-related document.csc :: CSC Hard Drive Bible 7th Edition 1994

archive.org

Page with specs is attached.

I tried an Adaptec controller with Mint on this drive, but that just froze the machine. Possibly something about the termination.
I am in the process of retiring overseas, so getting this handled would help a lot.
Also my landlord is on me about having too much stuff around my apartment.

Thanks