Recent content by Vin Digit

Oh yeah! Shame there's not support for CHS in modern IDE controllers Got it working in the original machine now - I think the Sound Blaster 16 card was causing conflict with the intergrated IDE controller so altered the jumpers settings to resolve this potential conflict :)

Great stuff, thanks for the info!

I have just been able to image the disk using the workflow in my other post! I think older IDE HDDs aren't compatible with more modern IDE interfaces - I had another low capacity IDE drive which I tried to image with modern hardware. Tried with a 2008 PC which crashed during `ddrescue` and a...

Fortunately it looks like the partition does not cross into the final cylinder. In PCem with a Xebec fixed disk adapter and a Type 13 HDD, I tested crudely an `int 13h` call using DEBUG and extracted the cylinder count. The value returned (304) was indeed two below the drive's cylinder count...

The size of the cloned image file generated from another drive is 21377024 bytes, divided by 512 gives 41752 sectors (which corresponds to 614*4*17). Additionally, when creating a 615c4h17s image file, with a total size of 21411840 bytes, in PCem I can see that the whole file is indeed not...

I'm working through some old MFM HDDs (backing up, erasing, etc.) but I'm noticing that the reported geometry from tools I'm using (e.g. Active@ KillDisk) are reporting one cylinder less than the stated hard drive spec. For example, I'm currently working on an IBM Type 13 20MB HDD with a Xebec...

Ah so the controller pairing is actually about ensuring the controller is the same model, revision, and firmware version of the card that originally formatted the drive not that it's literally the same card?

Am I right in thinking that controllers that don't have any jumpers or BIOS configs for the drives (e.g. WDXT-GEN) would write the CHS information to track zero? If a drive, LLF'd with a jumpered controller, were attempted to be read with a different (but compatible) controller without jumpers...

I've been using the cleaning disks for a while and at first they cleared some of the gunk off, but now they seem to not be clearing everything off. I put on the alcohol (isopropyl), insert the disk and let it spin for however long, then wait a few minutes for things to dry off. However I'm still...

No problemo Yeah I'm not sure how someone would have imaged an IBM 5160 HDD in 1983 for example, outside of removing it and copying it over to another drive with identical or no bad sectors (or indeed sending it over a PC to PC communication channel). At some point nowadays it's easier to just...

I've got myself a floppy cleaning disk but I'm at a loss on how to actually use it and don't want to try incase I ruin something 🙈 giobbi's post seems informative in that the RW head is moved over the wet part of the square 'disk' without it actually spinning (using ImageDisk). Outside of this...

Thanks for making this available. Would it be possible to release the source code for this? I'm looking for a wiper like this to use on MFM/RLL drives but one that uses the Gutmann method. Having the source code would allow me to add a Gutmann wipe in :)

Booted into Linux with the Gparted Live (before kernel 3.9 when the `xd` module was removed), however it appears my WDXT-GEN ISA MFM controller is not picked up (`dmesg | grep isa` shows `isapnp` but no sign of the controller). I presume this is the reason for the error "no such device" with...

Oh interesting thanks I wasn't aware of the `xd` kernel module, I'll look for a Linux system with that available. I've investigated a bit further the crashes I've been having with MHDD and booting Linux, and I think it's due to the Cyrix 6x86L CPU I'm using. I switched the CPU on PCem to an...

That certainly sounds like a possibility! Is there a config file that can be modified to allow the program to work with user-defined disk parameters? I have added a PCI NIC which the BIOS does recognise so that's a start :) I presume I'd have to set up a listener on another machine to receive...