Old school: How to get data from an MFM hard drive?

I have a friend that needs to recover some data from an old MFM hard drive. It was in a IBM 8086 PC, which died. I have the drive and controller card and am needing to know how to go about accessing this drive on a newer computer?

It uses an adaptec ISA controller card and I have a board to with a free slot. The problem is when I plug it in, it won't boot from the primary drive and it won't try to boot from the MFM drive. I'm guessing that the MFM controller is jumpered to be primary, but I don't know. Where do I start?

Is the card an 8 bit or 16 bit isa card? Only ask because I did this once but managed to put the 8 bit card in the wrong way round and blew both the card and mb Does the machine post when the mfm card is plugged in? You might try typing any model no's into google to see what it can turn up.

EDIT.

synthetic_fenix said:

How did you manage to plug it in backwards? those cards of the metal brackets on them to attach it to the back of a case.

The card I had was from an 8086 which had a wierd retaining system hence no plate on the back .

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Murdochs_mad said:

Is the card an 8 bit or 16 bit isa card? Only ask because I did this once but managed to put the 8 bit card in the wrong way round and blew both the card and mb Does the machine post when the mfm card is plugged in? You might try typing any model no's into google to see what it can turn up.

Click to expand...

How did you manage to plug it in backwards? those cards of the metal brackets on them to attach it to the back of a case.


to OP, you may try going into your bios and see what your exact boot order is, and also make sure its set not to boot to other devices if that is applicable. But the best thing is to do a google search on the model number of the controller card to find out all you can bout it.

It's an 8bit card, but it was mounted like a regular card so not a real good chance of it going in backwards.

I dunno why I didn't think to look up model numbers for the card on google. I found out it's actually a western digital card and I was able to find the jumper settings.

From whagt I gather, since you have set the IO address and IRQ on the card, that it should be matched up in the bios for that slot. I haven't had a chance to try it again yet but I will tomorrow.

If it has it's own onboard controller bios, which most 8 bit cards do (most 16s didn't), you have to set the mobo bios to no hard drive, so there is no conflict with the controller card.

edit: and keep interrupt #5 free, it was the common interrupt used by WD controllers.

eobard said:

If it has it's own onboard controller bios, which most 8 bit cards do (most 16s didn't), you have to set the mobo bios to no hard drive, so there is no conflict with the controller card.

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It does have it's own bios according to the jumper setting page.

Is there no way I can another hard drive hooked on the same pc at the same time? I was planning on dumping the drive onto another. I'll have to go some floppies if I can't.

schnikies79 said:

It does have it's own bios according to the jumper setting page.

Is there no way I can another hard drive hooked on the same pc at the same time? I was planning on dumping the drive onto another. I'll have to go some floppies if I can't.

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You might be able to get two kinds of drives working by putting the IDE on the secondary port, but I've never tried before so I can't guarantee it will work.

Which Western Digital controller model is it? I'm looking at my manual for my old 1006 model but that's a 16 bit card. I assume you've got a 1003????

Also, you should think about the possiblilty of networking two systems using a null modem cable under DOS and transferring from one system with the MFM drive to another with the standard IDE using something like Laplink.

btw: YGPM

yea i have a MFM controller and harddrives... from what testing i did, the card would only work once configured on a certian setup. i would have to reconfigure and format the drives when going to a new mobo/cpu setup. i had a old demo game i enjoyed playing it was some top down space game. i wanted to find the name so i could go looking for it. never did manage to ever the MFM setup to work even on the one it was installed on.