old disk access

[Peter Flynn]

(Apologies for top-posting: I'm still looking for an Android MUA that has a 
proper editor.)

I didn't realise you were trying to do this on a modern machine with an 
adapter cable. That is almost certainly the reason for some disks working 
and others not: as Robert said, all the computer can see is USB — it has no 
idea there's a disk drive the other end, and the logic in the cable setup 
only handles certain types of disk.

When I used to do this kind of recovery I used a 1990s generic PC assembled 
from parts so that I could mimic the original environment fairly closely. I 
agree with Gene that the disks are obsolete, but there are still hundreds 
of thousands of computers out there using them, so finding one you can 
borrow to do the job is probably not hard.

Look closely on the disks beside the jumpers using a magnifying glass, 
there is usually a little table of pins with cryptic abbreviations like M 
and S for the jumper positions. Failing that, ask Mr Google for the make, 
model, type, and size of drive.

Failing that, if the data is life-or-death important, or otherwise 
irreplaceably valuable,  there are many good companies out there who can 
recover data from old media.

P

On 16 May 2019 03:09:19 rikona <rikona at sonic.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 15 May 2019 21:58:40 +0100
> Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
>
>> On 15/05/2019 21:47, rikona wrote:
>>> Some of the old disks I'm trying to access are likely quite old -
>>> in the 250 to 750 MB range. Same connectors as old but larger disks
>>> [1GB and up] that I can access. In disks they just show up as
>>> generic ATA/ATAPI and it says "no media". A couple did a lot of
>>> screeching/beeping before they finally decided to run, but none of
>>> the very small ones show as a disk. What may be preventing me from
>>> accessing those smaller disks?
>>
>> How are you connecting these drives to your system? That is, what
>> kind of cable, what kind of connectors, and what is the other end
>> plugged into?
>
> I'm using a Vantec IDE/SATA to USB3 adapter, plugged into my Ubuntu
> 16.04 box. It has 3 different disk connectors on the adapter, for
> different kinds of disks. I've been able to see and copy from about a
> dozen old IDE and SATA drives. I copy a bit from these old drives to a
> second USB3, a Sabrent HD docking station with a 2TB SATA drive in
> there.
>
>> Most PC-type systems I have seen come with only two
>> hard drive connectors, so I assume one of those is your main drive
>> where your Ubuntu is installed which you're running, and you're using
>> the other connection for these old disks, one by one. Is that right?
>
> No direct connection to the MB. Case stays closed. :-)
>
>> If my memory is right, PC-style connections for ATA hard disks meant
>> the disks had to be configured as Master or Slave, depending on
>> whether they were meant to be the primary boot disk or not. To change
>> configurations you need to move a tiny little jumper between pins,
>> for which you need to refer to a little map of the pins printed next
>> to them, or have a copy of the original disk drive documentation :-)
>
> Some do have these jumpers but docs are long gone. :-( Some may have
> been in a comp with multiple drives - I vaguely remember that this may
> need jumper changes. Any thoughts as to how they should be configured to
> run in the above USB configuration?
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Peter
>
>
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