RLL relic from the past

[parning]

Stop me if you've heard this one before....

I was cleaning out my garage and found an ancient RLL drive I haven't used in years, along with (wonder of wonders) its accompanying controller card.

I hooked it up to an old 486 board I have and, to my surprise, it worked perfectly (miracle of miracles)!

It's got some stuff on there I forgot I had (including a really cool ANSI-based dungeon game and some old writings of mine), and I would like to download this information, but I ran into a snag:

I cannot get it to work with my 1.44MB 3.5 drive, it only wants to see a 360K 5.25 drive, for which I possess neither drive nor disks (can you still buy those?).

Failing that, I tried to gang it with my existing brand-new multigig drive, but I cannot slave the new drive to the old one because the old one boots to DOS 3.1, which will not recognize a 6 gig drive, and I cannot slave the old to the new because I cannot figure out which DIP switches to throw in which order to make it do so.

The old drive is a Mitsubishi MR535-U00, RLL, 977 cylinders, 5 heads, and 26 sectors. There are two sets of DIP switch banks; Bank 1 has 6 unlabelled switches, all set to ON. Bank 2 has 8 switches, labelled:

DS1: ON
DS2: OFF
DS3: OFF
DS4: OFF
R: ON
D3: OFF
D2: OFF
D1: OFF

Is there something I could do? I'm terrified of throwing switches willy-nilly lest I crash the drive and lose all the info I desire.

I should perhaps add that this drive is itself partitioned into two pieces.

PS: I also found my Epson FX-85 that I bought when it was state-of-the-art, and it not only works, but I found a brand-new ribbon cartridge still in the wrapper! Indiana Jones, eat your heart out!

I would appreciate any help on this matter. Thank you.

I'll send you the dungeon game if you help me!

Peter Arning
aka
!Pitr

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The opinions expressed herein are my own and not those of my employer.

[This message has been edited by parning (edited April 25, 2000).]

[BAD.IRON]

What I think you are trying to do is to get some of the old DOS programs off of your old hard drive. I had the same problem with an old IBM 30, there were many suggestions made as to how to get the information off of the old hard drive. To make a long story short, the answer to my problem turned out to be the DOS back up program. None of the programs were very large and transferred to just a few floppy disk. To make this work you must make a boot disk for the DOS you are using to make the backup and you will also need to copy the back up program to your boot floppy so that you can restore the programs to your newer system.

[parning]

I appreciate the hint about DOS backup... I've been able to score a 5.25 drive and a pile of blank disks, so I may yet try that.

HOWEVER, I found something even more interesting and useful! It's a German site (thoughtfully written in English, but the ads are Deutsch), called DCI Database for Commerce and Industry AG:
http://www.pc-disk.de/pcdisk.htm

There, I found all the information I needed about the disk.

And all it took was a plain old Yahoo! search!

It advertises "5.500 Festplatten", or hard drives, everthing from 1776 to ZSI.

I think it's definitely something to add to the Windrivers Links....

[parning]

Followup:

I managed to get the IDE drive to recognize the RLL drive, but for some reason it wouldn't read the data off of it.

What I *could* do is get the RLL drive by itself to recognize the 3.5" drive, from which point doing the DOS backup was a simple matter. Thanks for the tip!

It felt good to get my hands dirty again!

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The opinions expressed herein are my own and not those of my employer.

[oldman]

laplink is very good at moving files from 2 working computers would have taken about 20 minutes with only 40mg