Do you know old computers?

Ghost Train

Wow dusty

yeah it's the older model 30, the 8086 not the 286, so would be 8bit isa
and the floppy looks like 40pin, not the standard 34pin

zilog_jones

Looks quite a lot different from the Model 55, then again it's not a 386 among other things.

Looks like it only takes 8-bit ISA cards - what is the one in it there? Underneath that looks like a standard old-style Ni-Cd battery (the yellow barrel thing - made by Panasonic?), which are easily available from Maplin and similar places if it needs to be replaced.

It's definately not an ATA hard disk!

Looks like 30-pin SIMMs - unusual for a 286? Oh wait it's a PS/2! The 386 one I saw had 72-pins...

Judging by the top-most sticker on the power supply it was replaced in '96, which is good news for that, but probably bad news for everything else (esp. hard disk) as it suggests the machine was in regular use for 6+ years. That power switch control looks crazy

Also, get some compressed air!

Redundo

Just for infos sake, that card you can see in the bottom left of the last picture is the GPIB card used to connect the sensors of the CMM.

trout

Wow ... that's some amount of dust.

So ... is this what we know ?

The machine is an XT (8086).
It has a 720 Kb floppy. (not 1.44 or even 2.88 ... they were much later)
The floppy does not spin on start up. (I'm inferring this from previous posts).

The hard drive interface is ESDI. (not IDE/EIDE or ATA)
The hard drive spins up, and is loud. (ESDI hard drives always are)
The machine does not boot from the hard drive ... "Disk Boot Failure" error.

IBM Reference disks can be sourced, not launched - as the floppy drive appears dead.

Are these statements correct ?

Can you get any more detail of the hard drive ?

The size of the drive would be a very good indication of the type of encoding (MFM or RLL).
10 Mb or less it's most likely MFM. More than 10 Mb, it's most likely RLL.

If it was me, I would consider adding an ISA ESDI controller to a more modern machine.
You won't boot from this drive, but you may be able to access it.
You'd have to be very sure of the encoding though

Failing all that, have you considered handing the drive over to data recovery specialists ?
Maybe worth a phone call. There may be people on here who've used this type of service ?

PM me if you want to try and swap out the floppy ... I have a 1.44 Mb PS/2 you can try.

Redundo

That seems to be a good summary. I'll add that the HDD is a WDI-325Q which after a quick google-check seems to mean greater then 20mb but less then 100.

We dropped the drive into the computer shop this morning as they said there was a chance they would still be able to read it. If that fails i think we'll have one last go at getting a working floppy drive ourselves before binning it.

10-10-20

If you're unsure of the encoding, see if the HDD has a WP (write protect) jumper - if so, set it and it should prevent overwriting by the controller.

trout

edit - that's good advice on the WP jumper... if it exists, use it. The PC shop have no need to write to the drive!

If the PC shop can't read the drive, please don't bin it. You may still have options either here or via data recovery specialists ... apparently these lads can recover data from drives damaged by fire, floods, lightening etc. etc.

If you do get data off the drive, you may have fun getting the CMM controller program to run from a more modern machine. I'm curious to see how the CMM controller interacts with the device ... what drivers are involved? etc.

Do post back and let us know how you get on.

Best of luck