Help imaging two SCSI drives?

[jfar...@law.harvard.edu]

Hi all,

I have a proposal: would anyone, especially in the New England area, be able & willing to help with imaging a couple drives? The issue I have is equipment related and not a problem with the physical media (although I can't be sure the drives will fire up until I connect them). We're looking into a data recovery service but it would cost about $2k per drive and I was hoping to explore a collaboration with another repository that would be cheaper and build a sort of equipment-sharing relationship, if anyone is open to that.

So here's the story, please let me know if I'm misunderstanding the problem: I've been grappling with how to image two SCSI drives, a 54-pin one and a 50-pin one. By all accounts on the Digital Curation group, BC users group, and the wide world of the internet, there don't seem to be any more commercially available writeblockers for SCSI drives. I am able to find a few adapters to 50-pin but still would need a write blocker to image. Did I miss something obvious here?

If no, does anyone have the equipment that could help me out? Something you'd be willing to lend out or I could come to you for an afternoon and get images of these drives? (we'd probably both be more comfortable with the latter arrangement!)

Thanks for any advice or other help on this!

-Jess

Jessica Farrell

Harvard Law School Library Historical & Special Collections

[John Scancella]

Hi Jess,

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/635 looks to be what you want.

[jfar...@law.harvard.edu]

Thanks John! I'm replying back to this because I've gotten a little farther in this problem but am still stuck on one of the drives. 

I got my hands on a SCSI write blocker with 68-pin output/ribbon (thanks to this list and this inquiry!) and was able to image one of the drives pretty easily using a 68-pin to 50-pin SCSI adapter :)

The second drive still has me stumped. It's from a 1994 Apple PowerBook and it's basically the drive photographed here (see photo of "original 17mm thick SCSI drive") only difference being capacity. This 2.5" drive has 50 pins like a [regular/standard?] SCSI drive but naturally doesn't fit my larger/standard 68-to-60 pin adapter. I've also got basically this adapter except it's SCSI 2.5" 50-pin to regular SCSI 50-pin (not 54 like the description on this site says). This *almost* works - the pins on the hard drive line up with the adapter just fine, but weirdly enough the adapter is too "short" and doesn't slide all the way on to the hard drive - it only connects to about halfway down the pins before stopping. The further problem with this adapter is I also would need to get from 50-pin SCSI to 68-pin. As mentioned, I have an adapter that can do that, but because the power component is so close to the pins on this card, it simply won't fit.

So I have:

• A SCSI write-blocker with 68-pin output
• A 68-pin to regular SCSI 50-pin adapter
• A 2.5" 50-pin to regular 50-pin SCSI adapter (looks like this)

...and I still can't functionally connect this drive up. Please let me know if anyone has dealt with this particular hard drive model or can tell me I'm making this way more complicated than it needs to be :)

Best,

Jess