Hard Disk Imaging

Published Monday, August 27 2018

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This weekend’s project was to image all of my AT&T 3B2 hard disks to preserve the bits on them. To do this, I used David Gesswein’s MFM Reader and Emulator board, which allows you to either emulate an MFM hard disk, or read MFM data off of a real hard disk.

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A nice side effect is that the images you pull off of a hard disk are compatible with my 3B2 Emulator, so once they’ve been read off, you can just boot the image as if it were running on a real 3B2. Nice!

I’ve been pretty impressed with the MFM Reader and Emulator board. It’s a nice piece of kit to have around, and it’s fully open source. If you’ve got any MFM systems or hard drives lying around, give it a shot. It’s sold either in kit form or fully assembled at a very reasonable price.

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