I'm about to try the very same thing. I have a MicroVAX II with a sigma MSCP ESDI controller. It can be set for soft-secoring or various numbers of hard sectors. That is what I see is the big issue with these drives.
A friend gave me two drives that had been written on a PC under *nix. I do have some cable problems which I have to work on, but my first power-up revealed one of the drives and said it recognised the fact that it had 36 sectors. However when I tried to read it, it hung. More experimentation needed, but I am sure if the controller will read the blocks I will be able to extract an image to send to my friend to decode :-) let's exchange notes as we proceed. My effort is inter-twined with various other actoivities so I can't say when. cheers, Nigel Nigel Johnson, MSc., MIEEE, MCSE VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept! Skype: TILBURY2591 nw.john...@ieee.org On 2021-02-11 12:25 p.m., Mattis Lind via cctalk wrote: > What is the best way of dumping the contents of an ESDI disk? > > I have an original IBM Enhanced ESDI ISA controller board. Could that be > used under Linux? Or NetBSD/FreeNSD? I googled but didn't find much. > > Is there any other way of dumping the disk contents? > > In theory it should be just a matter of clocking the raw data and finding > the marks and extracting the data. Has anyone done something similar? > > /Mattis