MFM hard drive data recovery questions/ideas (help needed)

[David W. Erhart]

Hello cctalkers,

I'm trying to help someone recover data from an MFM drive in an old Pinnacle 1a system that had MirageOS installed.  The system hasn't been booted in years and no longer boots to the hard disk.  The drive spins up and sounds okay.  We've tried to track down a copy of the MirageOS boot diskettes for the Pinnacle 1a system but haven't found any after looking for months.

It's time to come up with a "Plan B".  Does anyone have a suggestion about how to read the "raw" data from the MFM hard disk?  I was thinking about putting in into an older PC based system with an MFM controller and using some utilities to dump sectors to files that I could convert into something readable/usable.  I haven't done this before so I'm hoping someone smarter has a 'cunning plan' of how to do this.  I'm a programmer and don't mind write some utilities to pick apart the data after it's off the hard drive.

Any ideas are appreciated.

Thanks,
david.

daviderhart at oldzonian.com
daviderhart at sageandstride.org
http://www.sageandstride.org