> On Nov 3, 2025, at 5:16 PM, Mike Katz via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> I just purchased an old Gimix computer (now if only I can get it from Orlando
> to Chicago before my friend goes down there for Christmas).
>
> It has an OMTI 20C-1 MFM hard disk controller with a IMI 5018 19MB hard disk
> drive in it.
>
> It has been recommended that i don't even turn the system on with the hard
> drive in it but rather I remove the drive an I send the IMI 18MB drive
> directly to a recovery house for data recovery.
Why would you do that? What would you expect such a shop to be able to do with
the drive?
If a drive is known to be bad, and you want to do a desperate (and expensive)
attempt to recover parts of it, this is how it's done. But if it isn't known
bad, it seems like a very expensive option just to read an old drive.
Also, if the format is obscure enough, you may not be able to find a data
recovery shop that knows it. But if you connect it to a Dave Gesswein MFM
emulator, it can slurp the waveforms right off the drive for safekeeping. Once
that is done, you can use the captured data with the emulator and not have to
run the drive again. Or you can convert the low level format to extract the
data, if it is a known format. If it isn't a known format, you then have an
interesting exercise to reverse engineer how the disk is encoded and teach
Dave's software to handle that format. It's pretty much universal, capable of
coping with just about anything that is MFM.
paul
