This is just wonderful. About three and a half years ago I booted the first real computer from my childhood as well: a Commodore Amiga 500. I had one mission and that was to clone the hard drive so that I could get all the stuff off of it before time had its way with the bits (there are excellent Amiga emulators that can actually run old OS). Not having any experience soldering, I would have been crushed if I had experienced the failure of a capacitor. Fortunately, fate was kind to me.
In that experience I learned how incredibly difficult it is to get things on and off of computers this old. Even though I lived through all the advances, my mind has a much rosier picture of the capabilities of old hardware than is actually true. Similar to this author, I had to rely on serial connections and some utilities developed by the Amiga emulation community running in Windows on an old PC to actually get it to work. And boy was it slow to move data. It took something like 48 hours to move about 80 megabytes of data. I was worried that was too long for such a machine to be running, but it held out. One of the partitions did have a tiny bit of corruption, but I was overall surprised to find most of the data intact.
Sadly, my shoebox full of disks is probably never to be recovered. Both floppy drives seem to be failing and reading Amiga floppies on modern hardware is possible, but an expensive pain.
Because of the inability of most modern PC floppy drives to read Amiga disks (since Amiga floppies use sectors outside of the appropriate "readable" range for PC disks, IIRC), it can be hard to convert Amiga disks to ROMs.
However, in ~2000 there was a mechanism discovered whereby you can take two PC 3.5" floppy drives and get a ROM from an Amiga disk. The way it worked is you have one PC disk that will be destroyed, and you instruct the floppy controller to do a low-level floppy-to-floppy copy operation from the Amiga disk to the (burner) PC disk. The CPU will listen in on the copy and get the full Amiga disk image, while the PC disk gets overwritten with junk.
I used this mechanism and saved all my old Amiga files, and happily play many of my old games (awesome retro demo-scene crackers/trainers included! yea!) using the UAE emulator to this day.
The big difference for me was that my old Amiga 600 has a PCMCIA card slot in it. I bought a modern (and very cheap) SD card reader that fit it and copied the necessary device driver over to the Amiga via a floppy. Thankfully it was already set up to read PC disks.
After that copying files (and the entire HD image) to and from my PC was straightforward - the driver even supports VFAT long filenames. I was impressed with the whole thing.
I had a similar issue with the Amiga's floppy drives, and was surprised to discover that some software called "AMI Alignment System" seemed to get the internal drive working fine again. I'm not sure if it worked some magic or just loosened up the drive a bit; either way it let me read my old disks again. It might be worth a try.
I had one mission and that was to clone the hard drive so that I could get all the stuff off of it before time had its way with the bits
Pff, hard drive? In my day, everything we ever coded was stored on cassette tapes. We never needed the computer itself to get them back, just a tape player, special software [1], and the good fortune that solar flares hadn't eaten all the bits yet.
The only real fight I ever recall my parents having was when my dad came home with that $1,000 100 meg hard drive. My mother was livid that he had not discussed it with her first. Years later, as I came to learn what our financial situation was like in those days, I understood just how crazy it was for him to do.
One of my earliest childhood memories was going to the computer store with my mom to buy my dad an Imagewriter II as a gift. I LOVED that thing and it is probably responsible for much of my love of computing. (I remember the day my dad taught me what PR#6 did… oh boy the paper I wasted after that.)
It was only over a decade later that I realized how crazy it was that she bought that for him, given that it was (a) $600, and (b) she knew absolutely nothing about computers.
When I attempted a similar thing on a C64 the external 5.25" disk drive was similarly inoperable. Turned out the elastic bands from the motor to the little ring that camped the disk had just gotten too lose with age.
Was a pain in the ass finding one that was tight enough to stay on and not to tight just just stop anything moving but got it eventually.
Might be worth popping the lid off and checking yours?
I'm not sure what they used for 286 era machines for hard drives but I suspect it was plain old IDE, which you could probably connect directly to a more modern machine. I was still in Amiga land until the 486.
Incidentally, the only 286 I ever owned was actually a board that I got for the Amiga that plugged into the CPU socket with the unholy alliance of a 286 + Motorola CPU. You could use them at the same time to run PC stuff and Amiga stuff. It was a hack of hacks. But it worked!
> I'm not sure what they used for 286 era machines for hard drives but I suspect it was plain old IDE,
It was not. It was the precursor to IDE, where the drive was just a disk and head actuator, and all the magnetic signal decoding electronics were onboard an ISA card plugged into an ISA slot.
What was initially offered as the first "IDE" was taking the analog electronics on that ISA card and moving them onboard the drive and just "extending" (essentially) the ISA bus out to the drive.
In that experience I learned how incredibly difficult it is to get things on and off of computers this old. Even though I lived through all the advances, my mind has a much rosier picture of the capabilities of old hardware than is actually true. Similar to this author, I had to rely on serial connections and some utilities developed by the Amiga emulation community running in Windows on an old PC to actually get it to work. And boy was it slow to move data. It took something like 48 hours to move about 80 megabytes of data. I was worried that was too long for such a machine to be running, but it held out. One of the partitions did have a tiny bit of corruption, but I was overall surprised to find most of the data intact.
Sadly, my shoebox full of disks is probably never to be recovered. Both floppy drives seem to be failing and reading Amiga floppies on modern hardware is possible, but an expensive pain.