Tom's computer pages

May 23, 2022

MFM (ST506) hard drives

These are ancient and obsolete. I used to have lots of them but have given them all away (with one exception) to ancient computer enthusiasts I know. The remaining one I have is from a Callan system and holds Unix edition 7, and I have hopes of recovering data from it.

ST506 notes from the AWS project
My notes on the Callan Rodime drive I have
The David Gesswein MFM emulator home pages

I have written software to use the original CWC (callan winchester controller) to read data from the drive, but had no success with it. The original controller is a multibus board. Either the hardware is broken, or I am doing something wrong.

So, I have turned to the "read" capability of the Gesswein emulator.

My first day with the Emulator
Analyzing data from the Emulator
Digging deeper into a transitions file
Adding a Custom format
Use --quiet 0 to dump a track
Hex dump a track with mfm_dump

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / [email protected]