Old harddisk Miniscribe model 6085

Hello all,

Does someone know how to access a Miniscribe harddisk model 6085 (MFM).


The priest in our parish did a lot of research of birthdays and day of
deaths from members
of our parish going back some centuries.
The PC he was working on was very, very old. Unfortunately the PC died
also recently.

Ofcourse he never heard of backups and now a lot of information is on
the harddisk to which
I can not get any access.
As I kept every PC which I bought he was lucky that I had still have a
PCXT and a PCAT PC
in my possession. However after that many years not using the PC's I do
not know anymore
how to configure a harddisk in the DOS mode. I know that some setup
programs were available
on those days, unfortunately I do not have them anymore.
Can you somenone please help me to get access to this harddisk?


regards


Jan Smits

Thanks Ron,

Your tip to use CMOSER worked perfect.
I connected the harddisk to my AT, started the CMOSER application and
it worked.

Thank you very, very much.


Jan Smits




Ron Cook schreef:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Jan Smits wrote:

Hello all,

Does someone know how to access a Miniscribe harddisk model 6085
(MFM).


The priest in our parish did a lot of research of birthdays and day
of deaths from members
of our parish going back some centuries.
The PC he was working on was very, very old. Unfortunately the PC
died also recently.

Ofcourse he never heard of backups and now a lot of information is
on the harddisk to which
I can not get any access.
As I kept every PC which I bought he was lucky that I had still have
a PCXT and a PCAT PC
in my possession. However after that many years not using the PC's I
do not know anymore
how to configure a harddisk in the DOS mode. I know that some setup
programs were available
on those days, unfortunately I do not have them anymore.
Can you somenone please help me to get access to this harddisk?


regards


Jan Smits

The PC-AT may give you the better option for recovering data.

You'll need to access the computer's BIOS setup routine; systems of
that era didn't hold too much information, though. Mostly they
contained the data, time, floppy drive information, hard disk
information, and some basic video information.

The Miniscribe drive hs a formatted capacity of 71 meg.
It has 1024 cylinders, 8 data heads (usually listed as 8 heads).

Two other parameters that might be required by the BIOS a
Reduced write current = 1025
Start write precomp = 512.

The PC-AT systems kept a list of commonly-defined 'drive types' in the
drive table. Each drive type was mapped to a particular combination
of formatted capacity, number of heads, number of cylinders, and
number of sectors.

As I recall, the AT's setup was accessed by booting a floppy diskette
with the setup utility on the diskette.
Some generic utilities are still available; 'CMOSER' (I forget the
version at the moment) is available via Simtel, at least.

You'll need to look through the list of drive types in your drive
table and match an entry to the parameters of the Miniscribe drive.
Most likely one of the entries will match.

You'll have two cables attached to the drive from its controller card,
if it's a normal drive.
Some Miniscribe drives (and others) were mounted on a card that
plugged in to a slot on the motherboard. The assembly contained the
drive, the MFM controller, and all the connections.

If it's a regular drive the cables from the controller card in the
computer will be 34-pins and 20-pins. You need both connectors for
the drive to work. The connectors and / or the cables should be
keyed or marked to indicate pin 1 of the cable / connector.

Hope this helps.
- --
Ron n1zhi

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE/ELzFO9oOG7OjB3YRAmqEAJ4tjNByCi9noXA20V+U8u11jXc/UQCfUy0v
iIIiAMGsBDpBO58LegjiGwk=
=nKnR
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----