The more powerful modern processor is also a lot cheaper than the cost of the vintage system too. The whole situation is amazing and laughable at the same time.
I'm not sure I will ever need archiving or emulating an MFM drive, but knowing you have covered it makes me happy! So thanks Shelby and Happy New Year!
I appreciate the specificity of Amp mate n' lock vs. Molex when talking about the power connector. Glad to see David's work getting more spotlight lately!
I honestly had no idea there was a MFM Reader/Emulator! Even back a few years ago I had troubles finding good working MFM drives let alone the controller card. This is a great device and I'm glad you covered it!
The "... aand half of it is missing... Oh, DriveSpace" moment was so epic. It's like the ghost of the Nightmare5160 was haunting, just by trying to mount its drive. "Oh, here's yet another completely stupid and unexpected problem. In your face. You're welcome."
This site and in particular this video is so bizarrely amazing. I always learn something new. You also seem to be truly amazed these things still work.
I picked up a non functional Facom K-10R from a shop in Japan a while back and have been unsure about how to get the data off of the MFM hard drive. I think this may finally be the break I needed for that project.
Man, that disk startup sound reminds me of nine-year old me working with my Tandy 1000 and my first half height mfm hard drive, all 10 megabytes of it.
The shutdown capacitor is sort of a throwback to when automatic head parking started being included in MFM drives. I don't believe the ST-225 was auto-parking, and I'm quite certain the ST-412 was not, so this is just one more way the emulator _won't_ get damaged, when either of those drives might.
Great video, this takes me back! I remember installing new Seagate MFMs into PC’s, you had to manually enter the bad sectors from the factory, it was a printout taped to the anti static bag
I built the non-supercap version of David's board over xmas. It's been a long term plan because I have several MFM drives in my VAXen, PDPs, Professional 3x0 and Rainbows that all need to be imaged. It's an amazing device.
This took me back to the late 80's and "Winchester hard cards" with the drive physically mounted on the controller expansion card. You can't get more "closely coupled" than that! I remember the happiness at the introduction of IDE as it freed us from the incompatibility nightmare that was MFM and RLL drives 🥴. This is a great device for disk archival, rescue and emulation to keep old machines running 👏👍
A lifesaver! I find this essential for restoring data to another device of the same drive model but with lesser defects. I may find myself needing one of these some day.
Them MFM drives and controller cards give me ptsd. Great to see that someone has created a tool like this. Thank you Shelby for creating videos that actually have good real world use case information in a good personable way.
Glad to only ever had dealt with one system using an MFM drive, but happy to see there's now a standalone solution to get them imaged at the flux level. Definitely the sanest solution for spinning rust lol
These are great! When the hard drive on my Kaypro 10 died, I bought a prebuilt one from David. It was easy to install and I was back in business in no time. His page has notes on using for various systems.
I have two of these. One on my DEC Rainbow and one on my DEC Pro-350. The drives were still working but they are very old and will someday die. So at least I have the data saved. These are actually quite amazing in how they work.
I wish you could make a 10 hour long recording of such a drive seeking, writing, reading, have it make it's iconic bleepy, squeaky sounds... You know, like they use them in movies when there's computers active.. Like Alien
Emulating hard drives and interfaces is so useful - I spent a few days this week installing AmigaOS using a Zulu SCSI that emulates both CD-ROM and hard drives - I could dump an ISO image for the OS install and an empty HD image as the target HD - the installation took 10 minutes compared to 30+ and the whole computer is quiet. These things are game changes for retro computing. Nice to see MFM is also possible.
Would love to see this concept shrunk down into an inline "adapter" that would allow plugging an IDE hard drive into an MFM controller. The "adapter" would make the host controller believe that it is physically controlling servos and magnetic heads while actually the adapter would be interpreting those control signals, issuing high-level I/O commands to the IDE drive, and encoding/decoding the data on the fly. Probably would be cleaner to use an AVR/Arduino rather than a Linux system.
It’s usually 63 sector offset in Linux fdisk because the first partition starts on the first sector of the first track on the second head (or the second head in Cylinder 1). You mostly see drives with fake CHS settings of 63 sectors per track but your drive must have 17 sectors per track. DOS FDISK just calls this Cylinder 1.
You can use "losetup -fP --show" on the whole disk image, or losetup and then kpartx, and it will find the partitions without you having to tell it manually. i.e. if the whole disk image ends up on /dev/loop2, then the first primary partition will be /dev/loop2p1, which you can then mount (without "-o loop").
I feel old. Many years ago I got some cast-off computers for work and had problems getting them working, Today I learned that the MFM disks and controllers weren't interchangeable. Oh, and the one thing I do remember getting working was a typing tutor program.
These are a bit before my time but still incredibly interesting. I think Adrian's digital basement would claim supremacy for content on the subject. Great channel.
You should never get that sound from a HARD DRIVE. Even floppies have a zero position sensor, so they shouldn't do it either, but programmers are lazy.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of using SBCs that are easily 1000x as powerful to emulate something simple like a floppy drive or REU. At the very least, if you're going to do that, design it to interface between new and old machines in a way that's seamless and doesn't feel superfluous.
I sort of agree but in this case how many people need an MFM emulator? It's not something with enough demand to put extra months or years of effort into. Anyhow, looking forward to your MFM emulator made from discreet logic and era appropriate battery backed SRAM.
Just FYI, bash can do math on it's own: $[$offset * 512] Also, there are some tricks with device-mapper (dm) where you can present the entire drive image as a drive and let the OS parse out the partitions... /dev/mapper/5160p1 etc. (I've done this a great many times over the decades.) (If you run an OLD (2.4) kernel, and can find the now ancient dmsos/cvf-fat code, doublespace volumes can be mounted from linux. All of that disappeared somewhere in the 2.6 tree.)
Everyone else: Oh, nice MFM reader/emulator. Me being the weird one: Oh, IBM made 5.25" half height blanking plates for the PC and XT cases! (I already knew about everything else in the video :D )
I built one of these MFM drive emulator boards a couple of years ago for a very oddball system. Managed to back up the original drive and emulate it perfectly! And what is incredible is that the drive controller is a Multibus card, an Intel iSBC 215, which itself has a very strange format. The last cylinder or two are blank, and causes problems when reading the drive initially, but can be tricked somehow and the whole thing just works. I really need to look into that again... The computer itself is a highly modified Intel System 310 with iAPX 432 hardware in it. One day I'll finish making my video for it... maybe :|
The Atari Megafile uses MFM HDD and converts in to ASCI (a variation of SCSI). I wonder how hard it would be to get this to work with that, both to read a working drive and to replace it.
“Hey babe what u watching? “No idea but he’s my favourite youtuber. Somthing about old drives and a thing with chips . Loved it , watched the whole thing .”
That is one nifty device. You said it was MFM-only. What about RLL? Since it uses the same physical medium and the same control signal (to the extent that it was actually possible to low level format a MFM drive to use RLL instead, without any guarantees it would work properly, but I have seen it work), any chance of that being a possibility in the future?
I worked with some of these drives at the dawn of my carrier, and I was happy IDE (and AT) coming out, so that I don't ever need to see these bulky hard disks again, yet, after watching this video, I somehow started to desire having such drives again, you corrupted me
I miss the sounds of the HDD working. I also miss the sounds of a modem connecting. So sentimental. You could tell a lot about the health of the drive by the sounds it made, and you could also tell the quality of your modem connection by listening to the initialization sounds of the modem.
Xebec is pronounced "zibec", it's an old type of ship. I totally don't know that because of how it was the name of an anime studio and the logo had a pronunciation guide.
I cut my computing teeth in the 80s on clone and IBM PCs, and the first thing you learnt back then was how tightly coupled each drive was to its controller, so watching this video, all I can say is "Witchcraft!". Amazing video. I am trying to think of a use case for using the emulator as a replacement drive with an original MFM controller, and I can't find one since by the point where the original drive fails, you are simply better off with an IDE upgrade even if it is emulated. Maybe the enclosure for the emulator could be modified to accept original face plates from the most popular drives of the era?
Some smaller form factors and cost-reduced clones had the MFM ports directly on the motherboard and might have one slot, or none, so even an XT-IDE may not be an option.
You have access to a lot of older sound cards and windows versions. Have you ever heard of the game Drowned God? A lot of us have been unable to decipher what the heads in the game are telling the player because the audio in the game sounds so bad and maybe its because we have bad hardware to run the game on.
protip wrt the script at 16:31 - I used to calculate the offsets the same as you do, but a much better approach is to use `losetup -f -P `. this will create partition devices /dev/loop0p* which you can mount!
Hot-unplugging MFM (or RLL) disks is indeed possible. Once. These are the PC disks that still needed to be PARKed, which moved the heads to a "parking spot" where they wouldn't destroy the platters as those slowed down and came to a rest.
I think those seagates do park themselves at least, but I'm not sure. Some drives of the era you had to park them themselves with a command, preferably every time you turned off the PC but at least if you intended to move the computer.
@Nukle0n You had to park then manually. There was an emergency power-loss half-assed auto-park but it was only rated to function a handful of times IIRC, so manually parking them was the norm. Source: I used these in the late '80s.
Parking usually moved the heads OFF the platter entirely. Some of the more modern (for MFM anyway) drives would move the heads to the center hub where little fingers would lift them off the platter. When the platters stop spinning the heads will no longer float; they can actually stick to the platter (a) preventing spin-up, or (b) rip the head off when it does spin up. Anything with a "voice coil" can "auto-park", but these old stepper designed had to be intentionally parked. It's surprising more of them didn't die from power failures, and users who just "pulled the plug" rather than do a full shutdown. This was a world without UPS's after all. I'm lucky, I guess. The Coco was the only thing I ever used with MFM drives. The MM/1, mac, and even PC's after it were all SCSI (or IDE.)
@@athompso99 Stepper drives never had the power to auto-park. Voice-coil drive will naturally "park" once the positioning electromagnet is deenergized, so long as the platter is still spinning. Some of the very early cylindrical voice-coils could use a capacitor for a "dying gasp" auto-park, but those were big heavy assemblies, so it didn't always work. (and it was always a bit violent for my taste.)
@@Nukle0n ST-225 pre-dates auto-parking appearing on consumer drives. You may be thinking of the ST-251, which does have auto-parking and was also very common although a few years later than the ST-225.
You could get a dead drive and put the emulator inside the drive’s case and reuse the original connectors, thereby having everything as original as possible!
God I could have used that like 15 years ago... Wanted to get the data off a drive and I didn't have anything that used Isa slot. Someone was "recycling" a pentium era computer that had usb and Isa so threw a knoppix cd in it
man those drives were so freaking slow, I remember on an Epson Equity pc I had installing windows 1.04 on it took almost a hour, for an os whose installer is barely bigger than a 1.44mb floppy disk combined.
is it expensive? Just imagine too that the hard drive emulator has several times more computing power than the computer itself LOL I got some old computers that could use a backup but I don´t really have any way to do that on the MFMs that I got
You wouldn't wanna use it as an emulator unless it's the only option, like on systems that can only take an mfm drive like the Apple Lisa I believe, unless someone made up an alternate solution already. On an old IBM like this you'd be much better served getting an XT-IDE , or maybe a PicoGUS. Of course you still need something like this to image the drives but you could also just do a fresh install, copy the files out on floppies or null modem first.
I think you need a new whiteboard. Or maybe just some new markers, but it looks like the whiteboard has reached the stage of just not taking marker very well.
It's more studio lights + shiny whiteboard being a Not Good combo - when he uses the other camera from a different angle, the text tends to be a lot more legible. Something less shiny (a more matte whiteboard, or even a chalkboard) would work better.
When you are the system administrator, using sudo on every command is a nonsense that wastes keys and consumes your vital time. sudo su can be your friend
I think a small lithium battery with a circuit would have been a lot more better Not liking that supercal fuckery. But the schematic looks easy enough to change
Nah man, pull that file off and write your own decompressor :P Oh, there exists a Linux driver apparently (no idea how well it works on modern kernels ... DMSDOS)
Worth noting that the device price is $250 CAD, that's Canadian Dollars. Time of writing that's ~£140, which seems like an excellent affordable price for such a powerful and niche device. Everything about this is awesome.
I love these projects where people take a processor hundreds of times more powerful than the entire vintage system to fix a niche hardware problem.
выглядит, как будто в пирамиду Хеопса встроили эскалатор, систему кондиционирования и торговые автоматы для удобства туристов.
The more powerful modern processor is also a lot cheaper than the cost of the vintage system too. The whole situation is amazing and laughable at the same time.
I'm not sure I will ever need archiving or emulating an MFM drive, but knowing you have covered it makes me happy! So thanks Shelby and Happy New Year!
I've used mine to image the drive in a Compaq Portable I restored for a customer.
Yep, any MFM drives I had in the past have long since made their way to the landfill, probably around 1990.
MFM drives look terrible, my first computer was a 486 and the first one I poked around the inside of was my friend's K6-2/300.
@@Kilakro Wouldn't that system be too new for MFM drives? It might have been an IDE drive in the K2-2.
@@jeremylindemann5117 it was, I meant that was the period I started, so I'm not familiar with MFM at all.
I appreciate the specificity of Amp mate n' lock vs. Molex when talking about the power connector. Glad to see David's work getting more spotlight lately!
I can't get over how absolutely massive those drives are. Absolute chonkers. Big lads. Heavy fellas.
Google magnetic drum memories. WAAAY bigger. ^-^
The IBM PC era HDD's were pretty great, for their time. When compared to what came before.
A b s o l u t e U n i t
It was Shelby in the Computer Lab with the MFM drive.
I honestly had no idea there was a MFM Reader/Emulator! Even back a few years ago I had troubles finding good working MFM drives let alone the controller card. This is a great device and I'm glad you covered it!
The "... aand half of it is missing... Oh, DriveSpace" moment was so epic. It's like the ghost of the Nightmare5160 was haunting, just by trying to mount its drive. "Oh, here's yet another completely stupid and unexpected problem. In your face. You're welcome."
This site and in particular this video is so bizarrely amazing. I always learn something new. You also seem to be truly amazed these things still work.
I picked up a non functional Facom K-10R from a shop in Japan a while back and have been unsure about how to get the data off of the MFM hard drive. I think this may finally be the break I needed for that project.
I know you from somewhere but I can't think of where.
Man, that disk startup sound reminds me of nine-year old me working with my Tandy 1000 and my first half height mfm hard drive, all 10 megabytes of it.
For me the sound of that ST225 is the sound a computer makes based on my childhood experience
I salute the people keeping this stuff alive. It would be sad to forget how we got where we are today.
The shutdown capacitor is sort of a throwback to when automatic head parking started being included in MFM drives. I don't believe the ST-225 was auto-parking, and I'm quite certain the ST-412 was not, so this is just one more way the emulator _won't_ get damaged, when either of those drives might.
Thanks!
The sound of that MFM drive. Nostalgia engage. 😁
Great video, this takes me back! I remember installing new Seagate MFMs into PC’s, you had to manually enter the bad sectors from the factory, it was a printout taped to the anti static bag
I built the non-supercap version of David's board over xmas. It's been a long term plan because I have several MFM drives in my VAXen, PDPs, Professional 3x0 and Rainbows that all need to be imaged. It's an amazing device.
Ooh, a Rainbow
This took me back to the late 80's and "Winchester hard cards" with the drive physically mounted on the controller expansion card. You can't get more "closely coupled" than that! I remember the happiness at the introduction of IDE as it freed us from the incompatibility nightmare that was MFM and RLL drives 🥴. This is a great device for disk archival, rescue and emulation to keep old machines running 👏👍
Your office space looks like you can smell the 80s in there, just beige and brown everywhere. 😃👍
A lifesaver! I find this essential for restoring data to another device of the same drive model but with lesser defects. I may find myself needing one of these some day.
Ah, the Gessweinator! Great to see now you have created the THIRD real RUclipsr demo of this device on RUclips...THANK YOU SHELBY!!
Them MFM drives and controller cards give me ptsd. Great to see that someone has created a tool like this. Thank you Shelby for creating videos that actually have good real world use case information in a good personable way.
Glad to only ever had dealt with one system using an MFM drive, but happy to see there's now a standalone solution to get them imaged at the flux level. Definitely the sanest solution for spinning rust lol
These are great! When the hard drive on my Kaypro 10 died, I bought a prebuilt one from David. It was easy to install and I was back in business in no time. His page has notes on using for various systems.
That is super cool! I wish I had the time, energy, space, and know how to do that.
That ST225 sounds lovely. You could sell that as ASMR.
I have two of these. One on my DEC Rainbow and one on my DEC Pro-350. The drives were still working but they are very old and will someday die. So at least I have the data saved. These are actually quite amazing in how they work.
I wish you could make a 10 hour long recording of such a drive seeking, writing, reading, have it make it's iconic bleepy, squeaky sounds... You know, like they use them in movies when there's computers active.. Like Alien
I have barely any idea whats going on but its interesting and kinda comfy.
Emulating hard drives and interfaces is so useful - I spent a few days this week installing AmigaOS using a Zulu SCSI that emulates both CD-ROM and hard drives - I could dump an ISO image for the OS install and an empty HD image as the target HD - the installation took 10 minutes compared to 30+ and the whole computer is quiet.
These things are game changes for retro computing. Nice to see MFM is also possible.
Doublespace is why that machine runs so slow. On an 8086 performance was only passable. Kool device
Would love to see this concept shrunk down into an inline "adapter" that would allow plugging an IDE hard drive into an MFM controller. The "adapter" would make the host controller believe that it is physically controlling servos and magnetic heads while actually the adapter would be interpreting those control signals, issuing high-level I/O commands to the IDE drive, and encoding/decoding the data on the fly. Probably would be cleaner to use an AVR/Arduino rather than a Linux system.
Cool stuff. What really amazes me is how quiet modern HDD's are. Im sitting close to my NAS with 5 drives, and can barely hear them 'work'
OMFG - I have an MFM drive on my shelf I've wanted to read for literal decades...
It’s usually 63 sector offset in Linux fdisk because the first partition starts on the first sector of the first track on the second head (or the second head in Cylinder 1).
You mostly see drives with fake CHS settings of 63 sectors per track but your drive must have 17 sectors per track. DOS FDISK just calls this Cylinder 1.
You can use "losetup -fP --show" on the whole disk image, or losetup and then kpartx, and it will find the partitions without you having to tell it manually. i.e. if the whole disk image ends up on /dev/loop2, then the first primary partition will be /dev/loop2p1, which you can then mount (without "-o loop").
I feel old. Many years ago I got some cast-off computers for work and had problems getting them working, Today I learned that the MFM disks and controllers weren't interchangeable. Oh, and the one thing I do remember getting working was a typing tutor program.
Mavis Beacon
These are a bit before my time but still incredibly interesting. I think Adrian's digital basement would claim supremacy for content on the subject. Great channel.
Hi i heard you were going to try to dump hydro thunder special edition do you plan on making a video
Oh, I do miss this tatatatatatatatatatata sound...
Oh, done, do not miss it anymore. Enough! 😊
You should never get that sound from a HARD DRIVE. Even floppies have a zero position sensor, so they shouldn't do it either, but programmers are lazy.
DriveSpace on MFM drive running on 4.77MHz 8088?! That's peak suffering.
another episode of lets put a enormously powerful computer (in comparison) in a vintage machine to replace falling and or rare parts.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of using SBCs that are easily 1000x as powerful to emulate something simple like a floppy drive or REU. At the very least, if you're going to do that, design it to interface between new and old machines in a way that's seamless and doesn't feel superfluous.
A running trend in hobbyist hardware.
I sort of agree but in this case how many people need an MFM emulator? It's not something with enough demand to put extra months or years of effort into. Anyhow, looking forward to your MFM emulator made from discreet logic and era appropriate battery backed SRAM.
You are brilliant and ingenious. Your video is an A++++++++++
Do folks use this in old industrial computers or this solely for hobbyists?
14:30 I don't get it. The bad sectors were there and marked by the manufacturer? But when the controller formatted the drive ???
Oh, this really deserves it better.
Sorry, i am a bit late..
i had to upload myself on a MFM drive..
is that a ST412 ?
Just FYI, bash can do math on it's own: $[$offset * 512] Also, there are some tricks with device-mapper (dm) where you can present the entire drive image as a drive and let the OS parse out the partitions... /dev/mapper/5160p1 etc. (I've done this a great many times over the decades.)
(If you run an OLD (2.4) kernel, and can find the now ancient dmsos/cvf-fat code, doublespace volumes can be mounted from linux. All of that disappeared somewhere in the 2.6 tree.)
That MFM Harddrive sounded like a MRT when laying inside D: Love preservation projects like those however! :)
Ooh, I wonder if this'll work with ACT Apricot / Sirius 9000 format disks, too?
The partition not starting at sector 63 could be a result of the drive geometry. If I remember correctly it depends on the number of sectors per track
That 5160 is probably questioning its existence, wondering if it's living in a simulation.
Everyone else: Oh, nice MFM reader/emulator.
Me being the weird one: Oh, IBM made 5.25" half height blanking plates for the PC and XT cases! (I already knew about everything else in the video :D )
Does the device also support burning back a disk image to a different disk so you can replace a drive that is almost bricked?
I built one of these MFM drive emulator boards a couple of years ago for a very oddball system. Managed to back up the original drive and emulate it perfectly! And what is incredible is that the drive controller is a Multibus card, an Intel iSBC 215, which itself has a very strange format. The last cylinder or two are blank, and causes problems when reading the drive initially, but can be tricked somehow and the whole thing just works. I really need to look into that again... The computer itself is a highly modified Intel System 310 with iAPX 432 hardware in it. One day I'll finish making my video for it... maybe :|
The Atari Megafile uses MFM HDD and converts in to ASCI (a variation of SCSI). I wonder how hard it would be to get this to work with that, both to read a working drive and to replace it.
you should park the heads when moving the disks around
I swear that sound brought back memories of the smell of old drives.thank you .also does it do rll as well?
Can it image/emulator RLL too?
Currently no, but possibly in the future.
You can get flux data from an RLL drive that might be able to be decoded in the future but it's not certain. UsagiElectric did a video on it recently.
“Hey babe what u watching?
“No idea but he’s my favourite youtuber. Somthing about old drives and a thing with chips . Loved it , watched the whole thing .”
OMG. Did you go through the Severance procedure? I can clearly see a Macro Data Refining terminal in the back on the right in the opening shot!
Severance Season 2 is out
what language were you writing in on the white board at the beginning there?
That is one nifty device. You said it was MFM-only. What about RLL? Since it uses the same physical medium and the same control signal (to the extent that it was actually possible to low level format a MFM drive to use RLL instead, without any guarantees it would work properly, but I have seen it work), any chance of that being a possibility in the future?
I worked with some of these drives at the dawn of my carrier, and I was happy IDE (and AT) coming out, so that I don't ever need to see these bulky hard disks again, yet, after watching this video, I somehow started to desire having such drives again, you corrupted me
Where is that 3d printed PC card stand from?
Very cool!
Can this device WRITE to the emulated drive?
I miss the sounds of the HDD working. I also miss the sounds of a modem connecting. So sentimental. You could tell a lot about the health of the drive by the sounds it made, and you could also tell the quality of your modem connection by listening to the initialization sounds of the modem.
Xebec is pronounced "zibec", it's an old type of ship. I totally don't know that because of how it was the name of an anime studio and the logo had a pronunciation guide.
I cut my computing teeth in the 80s on clone and IBM PCs, and the first thing you learnt back then was how tightly coupled each drive was to its controller, so watching this video, all I can say is "Witchcraft!". Amazing video. I am trying to think of a use case for using the emulator as a replacement drive with an original MFM controller, and I can't find one since by the point where the original drive fails, you are simply better off with an IDE upgrade even if it is emulated.
Maybe the enclosure for the emulator could be modified to accept original face plates from the most popular drives of the era?
Some smaller form factors and cost-reduced clones had the MFM ports directly on the motherboard and might have one slot, or none, so even an XT-IDE may not be an option.
when i hit 'like' it was 286, i was torn whether or not to actually press it 😅
You have access to a lot of older sound cards and windows versions. Have you ever heard of the game Drowned God? A lot of us have been unable to decipher what the heads in the game are telling the player because the audio in the game sounds so bad and maybe its because we have bad hardware to run the game on.
That's such a small 10F cap! I've seen 10F or 100F supercaps before but they were larger. I assume they were higher voltage, but still!
protip wrt the script at 16:31 - I used to calculate the offsets the same as you do, but a much better approach is to use `losetup -f -P `. this will create partition devices /dev/loop0p* which you can mount!
Howbdo you have yourself mic'ed up in the intro and the rest of the video? A lavelier?
When I used to service ZDS laptops the replacement drive would ship with the controller.
Really clever product. Don't suppose you know of anyone who has experience using more modern DDS drives for reading and writing audio DAT tapes?
Excellence!
Love the License plate I want a Missouri version. lol
Hot-unplugging MFM (or RLL) disks is indeed possible. Once.
These are the PC disks that still needed to be PARKed, which moved the heads to a "parking spot" where they wouldn't destroy the platters as those slowed down and came to a rest.
I think those seagates do park themselves at least, but I'm not sure. Some drives of the era you had to park them themselves with a command, preferably every time you turned off the PC but at least if you intended to move the computer.
@Nukle0n You had to park then manually. There was an emergency power-loss half-assed auto-park but it was only rated to function a handful of times IIRC, so manually parking them was the norm. Source: I used these in the late '80s.
Parking usually moved the heads OFF the platter entirely. Some of the more modern (for MFM anyway) drives would move the heads to the center hub where little fingers would lift them off the platter. When the platters stop spinning the heads will no longer float; they can actually stick to the platter (a) preventing spin-up, or (b) rip the head off when it does spin up.
Anything with a "voice coil" can "auto-park", but these old stepper designed had to be intentionally parked. It's surprising more of them didn't die from power failures, and users who just "pulled the plug" rather than do a full shutdown. This was a world without UPS's after all.
I'm lucky, I guess. The Coco was the only thing I ever used with MFM drives. The MM/1, mac, and even PC's after it were all SCSI (or IDE.)
@@athompso99 Stepper drives never had the power to auto-park. Voice-coil drive will naturally "park" once the positioning electromagnet is deenergized, so long as the platter is still spinning. Some of the very early cylindrical voice-coils could use a capacitor for a "dying gasp" auto-park, but those were big heavy assemblies, so it didn't always work. (and it was always a bit violent for my taste.)
@@Nukle0n ST-225 pre-dates auto-parking appearing on consumer drives. You may be thinking of the ST-251, which does have auto-parking and was also very common although a few years later than the ST-225.
You could get a dead drive and put the emulator inside the drive’s case and reuse the original connectors, thereby having everything as original as possible!
11:00 did you park the heads ok?
God I could have used that like 15 years ago... Wanted to get the data off a drive and I didn't have anything that used Isa slot. Someone was "recycling" a pentium era computer that had usb and Isa so threw a knoppix cd in it
man those drives were so freaking slow, I remember on an Epson Equity pc I had installing windows 1.04 on it took almost a hour, for an os whose installer is barely bigger than a 1.44mb floppy disk combined.
Some of those drives have a wonderful noise you really can't replicate. But pain in the ass is putting it mildly.
I always get a kick out of running linux on a modern computer to augment a computer orders of magnitude slower.
Sounds like a mini-MRI machine....
is it expensive? Just imagine too that the hard drive emulator has several times more computing power than the computer itself LOL I got some old computers that could use a backup but I don´t really have any way to do that on the MFMs that I got
You wouldn't wanna use it as an emulator unless it's the only option, like on systems that can only take an mfm drive like the Apple Lisa I believe, unless someone made up an alternate solution already.
On an old IBM like this you'd be much better served getting an XT-IDE , or maybe a PicoGUS. Of course you still need something like this to image the drives but you could also just do a fresh install, copy the files out on floppies or null modem first.
Fascinating. The Seagate St 4343 (300 mb) was notoriously unreliable and failed frequently. I hope you neve have to deal with those.
Wow, seeing original IBM PC with Ethernet and USB! I think it needs RGB RAM...
I think you need a new whiteboard. Or maybe just some new markers, but it looks like the whiteboard has reached the stage of just not taking marker very well.
It's more studio lights + shiny whiteboard being a Not Good combo - when he uses the other camera from a different angle, the text tends to be a lot more legible. Something less shiny (a more matte whiteboard, or even a chalkboard) would work better.
less gooo
Would be cool if they made a "hdpark" utility to run in DOS that makes the emulator's Linux shutdown gracefully. Unnecessary, but cool...
When you are the system administrator, using sudo on every command is a nonsense that wastes keys and consumes your vital time. sudo su can be your friend
I think a small lithium battery with a circuit would have been a lot more better
Not liking that supercal fuckery. But the schematic looks easy enough to change
Nah man, pull that file off and write your own decompressor :P
Oh, there exists a Linux driver apparently (no idea how well it works on modern kernels ... DMSDOS)
I've used it recently on some random compressed floppy only to find that it's empty, it still works but it's rather clunky.
Mfm looks like something a bored couple would do.
Worth noting that the device price is $250 CAD, that's Canadian Dollars. Time of writing that's ~£140, which seems like an excellent affordable price for such a powerful and niche device. Everything about this is awesome.
It should be called the MFMulator
Data General.....
Okay, real talk. Just how can I buy you a new whiteboard? I called out to Jesus when I saw the state of it.