Need data off ESDI hard drive

[Jill]

Hello.

I have a hard drive removed from an old PS/2 machine that is an ESDI drive
(with the solitary edge connector -- IBM WDL-330P).

Is there a reasonable way to do this using contemporary components?
Are there data shops that do this? It's only a 30 MB drive, so its
entire contents would fit on the smallest thumb drive.

Thanks.

 

[CJT]

Hello.

I have a hard drive removed from an old PS/2 machine that is an ESDI drive
(with the solitary edge connector -- IBM WDL-330P).

Is there a reasonable way to do this using contemporary components?
Are there data shops that do this? It's only a 30 MB drive, so its
entire contents would fit on the smallest thumb drive.

Thanks.

I think a better bet would be to resurrect an old system from that era
and then LapLink the data across. I seriously doubt you'll find any
contemporary system capable of reading it.

 

[Arno Wagner]

Hello.

I have a hard drive removed from an old PS/2 machine that is an ESDI drive
(with the solitary edge connector -- IBM WDL-330P).

Is there a reasonable way to do this using contemporary components?
Are there data shops that do this? It's only a 30 MB drive, so its
entire contents would fit on the smallest thumb drive.

Any well equiped data-recovery outfit should be able to help
you. Just get a quote.

For DIY you need an ESDI controller and driver and a mainboard
that has the correct slot for the controller. There are
EADI drives for the ISA slot, and you can still get industrial
mainboards that have one. Also a lot of people have older boards
with ISA slots lying around.

On the software side, DOS plus driver should do the trick,
you may have to transfer the data via floppy though. Linux
may also be able to access an ESDI drive, at least the ISA
variant which, I think, is actually compatible to the old
MFM/RLL controller interface. Not sure about that though.

Arno

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

I have a hard drive removed from an old PS/2 machine that is an ESDI drive
(with the solitary edge connector -- IBM WDL-330P).

Is there a reasonable way to do this using contemporary components?

Not really.

The problem with the ESDI drives used in PS/2s is that they used a non-
standard single edge connector. Standard ESDI drives used three
connectors for power, data and control. You could probably make up a
cable with an edge connector for your drive, find out the pinouts, and
by splitting the ribbon, run power, control and data to the drive from a
conventional ESDI controller card, but this would take time and there
would be no guarantee of success. In particular, I seem to remember
that there are variants of ESDI with different data clocks, and IBM
loved to customise its hardware to make it difficult to replace with
off-the-shelf components.

You'd be best tracking down and borrowing a surviving machine, the same
model as the PS/2 in which the drive originally lived, installing it and
copying off the data using serial, network, whatever. A parallel port
connection using DOS 6 Interserv/Interlnk would probably be quickest and
easiest.

A Google suggests that drive was used in the PS/2 Models 25-286 and
30-286. Of those, the 30-286 was by far the more common machine. You
will very probably also need the reference disk, which contains the
setup utility, to configure the machine once you have installed the
drive in it.

You will get more help if you post in comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware.