Backup of Utility files V/V+ 8.2

[Addi]

Hi folks,

recently I've bought a used AdeptOne robot w/ MC 610 (?) controller and V/V+ 8.2 installed. Unfortunately the system and utilities disks are missing and the build-in 10MB winchester drive seems to fail from time to time with a lot of read errors

So far I've managed to backup the operation system to floppy disk, but I'm not able to copy the utility programs (diskcopy.v2, config_r/c.v2, ...) residing in a separate HD directory to floppy, since they are "protected". I'm afraid that, if the winchester crashes completely, I've no backup of the utilities at all. 

I would be very grateful if someone could send me a copy of the above mentioned Utility disk 8.2 to Germany. Needless to say that I will fully refund the shipping costs.
I would also greatly appreciate any idea/hint to make backup copies of the mentioned files from my winchester drive.

Thx in advance
addi

[kai_n]

To be honest: I had to surch with google to get out what a winchester disk drive is/was.
http://www.duxcw.com/digest/guides/hd/hd2.htm
This page sais it has been build 1973. So thats really old. The only idea i got, wich might help: For most of the older home computers like Atari, Amiga, Apple IIe etc, there have always been enthusiasts building up hardware extensions. If you are lucky, back then somebody did build an interface for your old harddisk. Using this interface, and a newer interface to a newer harddisk, you can copy your data using a really old computer onto a newer harddisk.

[Jim Tyrer]

If I remember correctly from way back in the jurassic age, a winchester drive was a regular magnetic HDD that used the ST506/ST412 interface and were commonly called MFM or RLL drives. RLL had something to do with encoding and disk geometry. They had two cables connecting them to a HUGE controller card that slotted into the (16bit?) ISA bus,  a 20pin ribbon for data and a 34pin ribbon for control. They were also a pain in the butt to work with.
I know absolutely nothing about Adept controllers, but if you do happen to have an ISA bus in your controller there might be a possibility of finding an old IDE HDD controller card and using a disk image utility to copy what you have on the winchester over to an IDE HDD.
If your HDD has only one ribbon cable it means that it could be an IDE interface drive and then you might be able to take it out of the controller and connect it a regular PC's IDE ribbon cable, setup the bios to recognise it, and copy the files to wherever you want them.
Best of luck
JimT

[Addi]

Hi,

first of all sorry for my late reply and thanks to kai_n and jimtyrer for their suggestions.

In the meantime (before reading your contributions) I've already purchased several(!) old PC controllers (MFM/RLL)and winchester drives (EBay). Not to jeopardize my original drive, I've played around with this units and already managed to format one of the "new" drives in the robot controller. But when I tried to read this ADEPT format with the PC controller it seems that this format is not readable by the PC Bios. Also tried direct low level programming of the HDD controller circumventing any Bios functions but the ADEPT seems to be incompatible on sector format basis.
Formating/writing/reading with PC format works perfectly with the controller/drives combination, so I suppose it's not a hardware defect of the new components.

I'll keep on searching.  :-\
Thnx anyway.

addi

[Jim Tyrer]

If I understand correctly, you can setup and format drive on robot controller. Then if you take it back to a PC it won't work?

If the PC does not see any drive at all, or says that it is not formatted, or has a non-dos partition, it might be that robot is using a filesystem other than FAT16.
Try and run FDISK.EXE on your PC and see what partitions it sees on the drive formatted in robot. If it says NON-DOS you might be in luck,
and be able to plug it into a pc running Linux or one of the other GNU unices that will be able to read a wider variety of filesystems and transfer files.

[Addi]

Hi jimtyrer,

If I understand correctly, you can setup and format drive on robot controller. Then if you take it back to a PC it won't work?

Yes

If the PC does not see any drive at all, or says that it is not formatted, or has a non-dos partition, it might be that robot is using a filesystem other than FAT16.

According to my experiments I've found that the robot controller doesn't even use a sector format that is recognized by a PC controller. I have (low level) programmed the PC controller to access the HDD on a pure sector basis circumventing any filesystem structures but the controller isn't able to read a single sector without error. The error message says that it can't find any valid ID marks in the sectors which is way beyond the filesystem...
I suppose that the magnetic bit structure making up the sector is different.

Try and run FDISK.EXE on your PC and see what partitions it sees on the drive formatted in robot. If it says NON-DOS you might be in luck,
and be able to plug it into a pc running Linux or one of the other GNU unices that will be able to read a wider variety of filesystems and transfer files.

There are no (PC/DOS) recognizable partitions or structures on the disk. Yet I haven't tried Linux or something like that but I doubt this would help since the HDD isn't readable by the controller (as mentioned above)

thx again for your commitment
addi

[Jim Tyrer]

I assume that you are plugging the MFM card into the PC and trying to read the HDD. I suppose you would have to, the MFM drive would not be able to be connected to the IDE interface.
If you are using an assembler routine or something similar to call bios/dos IRQ's to read hdd, remember that if it is a non-dos partition, even the bios will probably not see it, bios is designed for dos/windows use.
Good luck and please post here when you find the solution.

[Addi]

Hi,

I assume that you are plugging the MFM card into the PC and trying to read the HDD. I suppose you would have to, the MFM drive would not be able to be connected to the IDE interface.

Of course, MFM needs two (smaller) flat ribbon cables and IDE needs only a single but wider one. Only the power supply cable is the same.

If you are using an assembler routine or something similar to call bios/dos IRQ's to read hdd, remember that if it is a non-dos partition, even the bios will probably not see it, bios is designed for dos/windows use.

Yes, that's also true and approved by my experiments  the HDD content/partition is not recognized by DOS respectively the BIOS.
I programmed the controller directly by accessing the corresponding hardware ports without any BIOS or Interrupt calls.

Just to keep you informed, here is my workaround: 
Coincidentally I got in touch (via EBay) with someone who sold me some spare parts and a few software disks for my robot. Unfortunately the Utility disk was of Version 10.1 (not the needed 8.2)  and didn't work correctly with my V/V+ 8.2 system. But having the Utility programs on diskette for the first time, I was able to "patch" the file copy utility (Ver.10.1) with a diskeditor and use this patched version to make me copies of my wanted Utilities subdirectory (from HDD to floppy).
Puuuuh, sounds complicated but it worked.   
Now that I had backups of the complete system and could install a new winchester drive and re-install the whole software.

Thx again for you commitment
greetz
addi