Lecroy 7200 MFM drive replacement

[Andrei Kudryavtsev]

Hi there, 

I'm trying to preserve Lecroy 7200 digital scope for another decade and clearly MFM drives is the major issue for them. They boot off those, not just store the recorded traces, so it's critical for the operation. After reading this article http://www.ccltd.com/LeCroy7200A/7200.html

specifically this statement "NOTE You can not use an old PC to low-format the MFM drives. It must be done using the LeCroy software. Also you can not use a PC to back up the hard drive. The 7200 used an AMD AM9580A-10LC/30 hard disk controller. This controller is different than the WD chips used in the old PCs."

So it seems that MFM encoding scheme is different (not the obvious filesystem). 

I'm wondering is it worth trying this emulator or maybe somebody has already tried it in this configuration?

[David Gesswein]

The emulator probably can read the disk and emulate it but on the
referenced page it says "All of these drives are in a 3.5" form factor"
My board is 5.25" form factor so won't fit in the unit unless their is some
more space around the drive. My board is around 5.75" x 4.5" x 1.5"

This statement gives me some question on if the emulator will work properly.
"The 8425F which was a faster version of the 8425 will not work
based on my testing."

My emulator doesn't try to emulate actual seek speeds of drives so if a
drive with faster seek doesn't work my emulator may not work either. Some
indication that precompensation changed between the two drives. My
unit doesn't care about precompensation.

Their is the DREM unit which is 3.5" form factor available online. It can't
read existing drives so you would need to format the drive and reinstall the
software.

On Sun, Dec 11, 2022 at 12:57:00PM -0800, Andrei Kudryavtsev wrote:
> Hi there,
> I'm trying to preserve Lecroy 7200 digital scope for another decade and
> clearly MFM drives is the major issue for them. They boot off those, not
> just store the recorded traces, so it's critical for the operation. After
> reading this article http://www.ccltd.com/LeCroy7200A/7200.html

> specifically this statement *"NOTE You can not use an old PC to low-format

> the MFM drives. It must be done using the LeCroy software. Also you can not
> use a PC to back up the hard drive. The 7200 used an AMD AM9580A-10LC/30
> hard disk controller. This controller is different than the WD chips used

> in the old PCs."*

> So it seems that MFM encoding scheme is different (not the obvious
> filesystem).
> I'm wondering is it worth trying this emulator or maybe somebody has
> already tried it in this configuration?
>

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[Andrei Kudryavtsev]

Thank you David, 

DREM is clearly the option, but it's $300 which I'm not sure it's worth to restore Lecroy 7200 despite how cool it is. 

Yours makes it more interesting. There is plenty of space internally to mount it. It sits on a plate that has a lot of space. 

Regarding the seek speed, I'm not sure how real this statement is. I ran it for the test with an older 5.25" Maxtor full profile drive without a problem, except that it doesn't fit inside :) There might be some limitations for realtime trace recording, but I'm not into that. 

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