| I recovered a post apo novel written like 30 years ago by a friend last year. Patient : Miniscribe 8425SA 20 MB SCSI hard disk from an Apple Hard Disk 20SC (external SCSI enclosure with a HDD). Hoped the disk was still in working condition after more than a decade stored (HDD was built in '88 and a sticker mentioned a repair in '99), the enclosure power supply was presumed dead (no power on) and the mac itself was shorting mains power in a few little minutes, probably from the screen high voltage converter dying and shorting. I simply extracted the hard disk from the enclosure. This full height 3.5" disk has an "external" mechanical actuator : a stepper motor visible from outside drives the arm with the head(s) inside the disk, protected by a bellows. It gives a cool sort of a floppy drive sound when random access occurs. I simply plugged it on a SCSI chain on my vintage Advansys SCSI PCI Card and ribbons. Read the HFS partition with an old recovery software I could find on the recovery computer, quickly found the files (very simple file system and hierarchy), recovered them on the PC. Encountered just one bad sector. Then looked the content of the file as raw shaking and ajusted the recovered text format for use with Windows PC/Word from the old word processor software - I think they were Corel Wordperfect files. Very few correction to make to the raw text. Layout will have to be more thoroughly restored beyond EOL. Mainly accented characters and a few other replacements to do. I thought it would be more of an chore from an vintage apple system and third party software. Overall, it was far easier than expected. Took me less than 2 hours. But am a ex data recovery guy with some ressources. Quite pleased the miniscribe acted almost like a charm after 10 years or so of (warm, indoor) storage and not a single power on. Feared the HDD motor's ball bearing were totaly stuck ! |