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

[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.

[bsdphk@fosstodon.org]

@tubetime

The fastest way to find out, is probably if you send me the image, but I can also walk you through the setup so you can run AA yourself.

(I've never finished the proper python packaging so it's a bit manual)

[dgesswein@mastodon.social]

@tubetime

With some effort it may be possible to recover more if its just heads were pulled out of alignment when they were stuck.

Data recovery using microstepper

(www.pdp8online.com)

If you want me to take a look at your transitions file to see if I think that method may work send me a private message.

[barryjsullivan@mstdn.social]

@tubetime There’s just a lot of data in that cylinder them heads are reading.

[barryjsullivan@mstdn.social]

@tubetime Try SpinRite 6.0 that will fix it right up.