This might be bit of a stretch here, but I assume you're using an ATX power supply. Do you know if it's supplying -5v? I know most of the newer ATX PSUs, and probably some older ones lacked -5v, but that may have only affected some sound cards.

just copy the files with a floppy disk. Or add an ide drive or network to the olivetti and copy that way.

There are forensics programs that work in dos that you can image the drive from a floppy however I don't know any off hand that work with machines of that vintage that are bootable. Could if possible move the drive onto a more modern machine and attempt to image that way like a 9x system or preferably a xp machine but I don't know if 9x and xp can detect mfm and rll drives.

If your hard disk does NOT contain protected things (i.e.: files that need to go into fixed positions), I guess the cheaper way to do it is using serial port to transfer files. Making (or obtaining) a serial crossover cable is easy, the simplest one can be made using only three wires (TxD to RxD, GND to GND and RxD to TxD). The connection will be slow, but I guess you'll need to transfer files only once.

The software to do the transfer would be laplink, interlnk/intersvr (those files came with DOS 6.0 or later), norton commander. Remember that boot files won't work... to preserve them make a bootable disk using FORMAT and SYS, and then copy FDISK, FORMAT and SYS into it. Then make a backup (a image) of that floppy.

That way, you'll get a copy of every file on your hard disk and a bootable disk that can help you to retrieve that data. The next step would be firing a virtual machine and "restore" the data.

If you are really serious about this i think a MFM controller will work alongside an XT-IDE card. You can make a disk duplicate even in your XT machine instead of trying to make the MFM drive work on a modern system which might be a royal pain in the ass.

You can also try a network card tat works on an XT and use mTCP to transfer the files, by setting up a Filezilla (or other program) server on the modern machine.

Another idea.. Hook-up an external Compact Flash reader to your parallel port.
You can then use a DOS based disk imaging software to store a backup file on a CF card. Or simply use xcopy.

luckybob's suggestion of using your floppy drive to transfer files seems simplest to achieve. After all, even if the drive was filled to the gills, it's stil only 21MB. It won't take that many transfers to get the data off.

When I had a 20 MB hard drive and MS-DOS 3.x I used the DOS BACKUP tool to copy stuff to (360 KB) floppy disk. I think there was also a backup program that came with Windows 9x, but don't remember if it used the same data format.

eta: actually BACKUP is a DOS 6.x command:

http://web.csulb.edu/~murdock/msbackup.html

I no longer remember what I used to back up DOS 3.x.

clueless1 wrote:

luckybob's suggestion of using your floppy drive to transfer files seems simplest to achieve. After all, even if the drive was filled to the gills, it's stil only 21MB. It won't take that many transfers to get the data off.

Hmmm.. I once used PC-Backup from Central Point Software. I think it was part of PC-Tools Deluxe 4.x.. It was quite interesting.
It featured data compression, CRC and its own floppy format (except for the master disk).
I also remember that this program detected the floppy by itself, when inserted into the drive.
I guess this thing was programmed by some sort of assembler guru(s). OS2Museum even has an article about its disk format.

MFM HDDs do not get 'detected', you have to enter either the type or the geometry in BIOS.

carlostex wrote:

If you are really serious about this i think a MFM controller will work alongside an XT-IDE card. You can make a disk duplicate even in your XT machine instead of trying to make the MFM drive work on a modern system which might be a royal pain in the ass.

I have seen mentions that MFM/RLL drives and IDE drives usually don't play together nicely in a system, and that a safer bet is MFM and SCSI. YMMV.

The Olivetti M240 has an 8086 processor. So it may or may not have 16Bit slots.
If the MFM controler is an 8bit type, it may have an on-board BIOS (typical for XT systems).
But I'm speaking under corretion. Olivetti was always "special" when it comes to their PCs.

elianda wrote:

MFM HDDs do not get 'detected', you have to enter either the type or the geometry in BIOS.

That makes sense. The problem is that this Compaq doesn't have the classical BIOS setup where you can chose those options, so I guess I'll have to use another PC for this.

Brickpad wrote:

This might be bit of a stretch here, but I assume you're using an ATX power supply. Do you know if it's supplying -5v?

Yes, it's ATX (sort of, one of the pins in the 20-pin connector isn't according to the standard). It should be supplying -5V, since it says so in the sticker. Not much current though, only 0.3A, but should be enough.

Thanks everybody for the suggestions, but I really want to make a disk image, not copy the files. Maybe I can make this run in some kind of emulator or VM in the future.

BTW, in the mean time I found out that the controller card in question is a Western Digital wd1002a-wx1 and there are manuals online for it 😁

Jo22 wrote:

The Olivetti M240 has an 8086 processor. So it may or may not have 16Bit slots.
If the MFM controler is an 8bit type, it may have an on-board BIOS (typical for XT systems).

It doesn't have 16-bit slots unfortunately. All of them are 8-bit, and it seems to be a clone of an IBM XT but with a better CPU. The controller in indeed 8-bit, and it seems to have an on-board BIOS like you mention.

carlostex wrote:

If you are really serious about this i think a MFM controller will work alongside an XT-IDE card. You can make a disk duplicate even in your XT machine instead of trying to make the MFM drive work on a modern system which might be a royal pain in the ass.

That's a good option, but I'd have to buy a XT-IDE card first 😀 I'll probably buy one anyway, so if all the other royal pain in the ass options don't work, I'll try that. I'd need some kind of imaging program that works on DOS 3.3, and I'd need to configure the PC to work with both the XT-IDE and the Miniscribe HDD, so basically any way I try to do it it will be a royal PITA.

devius wrote:

elianda wrote:

MFM HDDs do not get 'detected', you have to enter either the type or the geometry in BIOS.

That makes sense. The problem is that this Compaq doesn't have the classical BIOS setup where you can chose those options, so I guess I'll have to use another PC for this.

You require most likely some kind of RAM BIOS boot disk that is a common way of configuring old computers.

elianda wrote:

You require most likely some kind of RAM BIOS boot disk that is a common way of configuring old computers.

Well, the Compaq has a BIOS setup program, it just doesn't have the option of setting up disks like that. I can only enable and disable the IDE controller and it will automatically detect any connected HDD/CD-ROMs. This newer PC is from a time when backwards compatibility with MFM HDDs was not very important (1999), and it's a Compaq, not a generic beige box, so even less likely to support as much old hardware as possible.

I have a version of the mTCP Netcat program that will basically let you stream the contents of a hard drive from a vintage machine to another machine on the network. It's basically the same thing that Ghost would do over a network - imaging the entire drive sector by sector. With something like a Xircom PE3-10BT parallel port to Ethernet adapter you can boot from a floppy and image the drive with minimal disturbance to the system.

After that, you can poke around the image using Linux, VMWare, VirtualBox, etc.

It's not ready for distribution yet - I did it as a hack for a data recovery project. But if there is some interest in a utility that can do this at the hard drive or partition level then I could work on it and get it in the next mTCP.

Or else, again, consider SCSI.

mbbrutman wrote:

I have a version of the mTCP Netcat program that will basically let you stream the contents of a hard drive from a vintage machine to another machine on the network. It's basically the same thing that Ghost would do over a network - imaging the entire drive sector by sector. With something like a Xircom PE3-10BT parallel port to Ethernet adapter you can boot from a floppy and image the drive with minimal disturbance to the system.

That sounds interesting, but also a lot of trouble unless you already have the network set up. I don't, and the only 8-bit network card I have only has AUI and BNC connectors, and I only have cables and switches for twisted pair, so it would also mean a lot of work to get everything setup.

Getting that parallel port adapter would mean getting 720K floppies (the Olivetti only has a single 3.5" 720K drive) and making it work that way. Seems like whatever option I chose it's not going to be as easy as making an image of a more recent IDE disk 😢