ahh, the HP 9133A - the largest and heaviest external 3 1/2" floppy drive ever built.

[furrybeta@shark.community]

@ball @tubetime That they did. They also had this habit of, after several years of service, a need to push on a corner of the face plate (upper right, iirc) to get the drive to spin up. Not sure what this torqued by a few thousandths, but it was enough to keep it working! The tricks one learns

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

@vk3kri yes

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

on to the surprise hard drive. but, no surprise, it won't spin up and pulls a bunch of current on 12v. hmmm.

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

the motor won't move. I think it is stiction. ugh.

[chuckmcmanis@chaos.social]

@tubetime Dude, that is the OG Hard Drive there, ya gotta respect what it heralded in the years to come. I mean sure, you can get a short M.2 drive today that holds as much as a million of those drives could but hey, on a minicomputer or a CP/M system, it was So Much Space!

[scruss@xoxo.zone]

@tubetime are these from the time that 3.5" disks had shutters with rounded apertures, and the shutters latched open? I remember some of my Dad's HP kit was like that

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

yeah all the heads are stuck. trying a heat gun now...

[darryl_ramm@hachyderm.io]

@tubetime

Hola AMIGO.

[yngmar@social.tchncs.de]

@tubetime Tap on the side with a hammer often sorted that.

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

it spins, but it sounds bad. not much hope for this drive, unfortunately.

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

the Gesswein MFM emulator was able to capture a flux transition dump! i used their mfm_util to analyze it, and it is a very odd format: check out the command line:

--format EC1841 --sectors 32,0 --heads 4 --cylinders 153 --header_crc 0x0,0xa00805,32,4 --data_crc 0x0,0xa00805,32,4 --sector_length 256

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

example output of the analyze command... some bad sectors, but a lot of good ones!

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

output of 'strings' shows some cool stuff!

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

the HPIB verification program for the HP5005B signature analyzer. wild

[drscriptt@oldbytes.space]

@tubetime I feel like knowing what stiction is, without looking it up, dates us.

[brouhaha@mastodon.social]

@tubetime
Maybe it just needs some Head and Shoulders (TM).

[brouhaha@mastodon.social]

@tubetime
Apple sold tons of 3.5" single-sided drives (Sony mechanism, but special for Apple, because... Apple.)
They were uncommon in PCs.

[bsdphk@fosstodon.org]

@tubetime

My AutoArchaeologist toolkit can turn the LIF filesystems into static HTML files so you can spelunk the contents.

Example:

⟦056ab17c6⟧

(phk.freebsd.dk)

Software:

AutoArchaeologist

AutoArchaeologist - Python tool-chest for presenting contents of old data-media as static HTML files.

Codeberg.org (codeberg.org)

[tubetime@mastodon.social]

@bsdphk useful, can it handle partially corrupted images?

[bsdphk@fosstodon.org]

@tubetime

I dont know how robust the LIF excavator is, I have only written/tried it on good images, but the general idea of AA is to handle whatever you throw at it, as well as possibe.