I have an old Seagate ST251 MFM drive that just croaked. While booting
up it made some horrendous "clacking" noises and now I get a drive
failure indication when booting up. It defaults and then I can boot
off a floppy and still get into C: (the first partition) The problem
and where my needed data is drive d and although the drive is there
doing a dir gets you a data error message. Scandisk can't touch it and
Norton says that the FAT is bad and only a low level format can
correct this. Well if I wanted to do a format I wouldn't be interested
in retrieving my data. The OS is DOS 6.2. Does anyone know of a good
utility that I can down load in DOS and that will work with DOS and
give me at least a prayer of getting my data back? And if its a free
utility all the better. Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

wrote:
I have an old Seagate ST251 MFM drive that just croaked. While booting
up it made some horrendous "clacking" noises and now I get a drive
failure indication when booting up. It defaults and then I can boot
off a floppy and still get into C: (the first partition) The problem
and where my needed data is drive d and although the drive is there
doing a dir gets you a data error message. Scandisk can't touch it and
Norton says that the FAT is bad and only a low level format can
correct this. Well if I wanted to do a format I wouldn't be interested
in retrieving my data. The OS is DOS 6.2. Does anyone know of a good
utility that I can down load in DOS and that will work with DOS and
give me at least a prayer of getting my data back? And if its a free
utility all the better. Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

If you have the OLD Norton for dos,the Norton Utilities 8.0 or
earlier, you might try to make a binary copy of the disk,
if memory plays no tricks on me disk edit is able to do this,
if the disk is readable at all.
It could be set to ignore all errors.
At my work we did this, and wrote a fortran program to search
for character blocks with the properties of source code.
Each fortran progam ended with: tabendcr.
We recovered about 95 % of the sourcecode on the disk.
We sometimes ended up with 10 copies of each program,
with a slightly different age/edit stage.
Fragmented diskdata will be useless, but luckily the disk
had recently been defragmented.

wrote in message
oups.com...
I have an old Seagate ST251 MFM drive that just croaked. While booting
up it made some horrendous "clacking" noises and now I get a drive
failure indication when booting up. It defaults and then I can boot
off a floppy and still get into C: (the first partition) The problem
and where my needed data is drive d and although the drive is there
doing a dir gets you a data error message. Scandisk can't touch it and
Norton says that the FAT is bad and only a low level format can
correct this. Well if I wanted to do a format I wouldn't be interested
in retrieving my data. The OS is DOS 6.2. Does anyone know of a good
utility that I can down load in DOS and that will work with DOS and
give me at least a prayer of getting my data back? And if its a free
utility all the better. Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

Try spinrite
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

Colin

wrote in message
oups.com...
I have an old Seagate ST251 MFM drive that just croaked. While booting
up it made some horrendous "clacking" noises and now I get a drive
failure indication when booting up. It defaults and then I can boot
off a floppy and still get into C: (the first partition) The problem
and where my needed data is drive d and although the drive is there
doing a dir gets you a data error message. Scandisk can't touch it and
Norton says that the FAT is bad and only a low level format can
correct this. Well if I wanted to do a format I wouldn't be interested
in retrieving my data. The OS is DOS 6.2. Does anyone know of a good
utility that I can down load in DOS and that will work with DOS and
give me at least a prayer of getting my data back? And if its a free
utility all the better. Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.




Am I the only person who is shocked that you still had one of these that
worked? What is this drive in a IBM PC AT?

Well anyhow I agree with what someone else suggested.. Try the old dos
norton, maybe it will work.

Mike

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:40:32 -0700, "
put finger to keyboard and composed:

I have an old Seagate ST251 MFM drive that just croaked. While booting
up it made some horrendous "clacking" noises and now I get a drive
failure indication when booting up. It defaults and then I can boot
off a floppy and still get into C: (the first partition) The problem
and where my needed data is drive d and although the drive is there
doing a dir gets you a data error message. Scandisk can't touch it and
Norton says that the FAT is bad and only a low level format can
correct this.

There are two copies of the FAT. If only one copy is damaged, and if
the file system is otherwise intact, then it should be possible to
retrieve all your files.

Well if I wanted to do a format I wouldn't be interested
in retrieving my data. The OS is DOS 6.2. Does anyone know of a good
utility that I can down load in DOS and that will work with DOS and
give me at least a prayer of getting my data back? And if its a free
utility all the better. Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

I'd run Norton's Diskedit in maintenance mode and backup the D:
partition (20MB ???) to a stack of floppy diskettes in sector mode.
I'd then create a partition on a new HD and use Diskedit to transfer
the backed up sectors to this new partition. Scandisk or Norton should
then be able to repair the damaged FAT.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

Try ontrak easy recovery if you can find it, might be something on
hiren's bootcd or ultimate bootcd.
As a matter of fact, use hiren's bootcd and under harddisk tools run
MHDD, press F4 and turn remap and loop test/repair on.
After that there's a big chance you find the drive can access your data.
There are recovery tools on hiren's bootcd as well.

Cheetah

wrote:

I have an old Seagate ST251 MFM drive that just croaked. While booting
up it made some horrendous "clacking" noises and now I get a drive
failure indication when booting up. It defaults and then I can boot
off a floppy and still get into C: (the first partition) The problem
and where my needed data is drive d and although the drive is there
doing a dir gets you a data error message. Scandisk can't touch it and
Norton says that the FAT is bad and only a low level format can
correct this. Well if I wanted to do a format I wouldn't be interested
in retrieving my data. The OS is DOS 6.2. Does anyone know of a good
utility that I can down load in DOS and that will work with DOS and
give me at least a prayer of getting my data back? And if its a free
utility all the better. Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.


Some suggestions:

1. If this is really critical data, contact Ontrack for data recovery
services and get a quote; they will disassemble the drive in a
clean room and use special equipment to recover the data.

2. If it isn't quite so critical and you feel comfortable with
running a failing drive for awhile, add an additional physical
drive (suggest scsi) to the machine and use Norton Diskedit
to copy all sectors to a file on the additional drive, with
manual intervention to skip unreadable sectors as they occur.
You can then use a variety of tools, including Diskedit, to
analyze the data and recover the FAT to get access to your files.

3. After saving as much data from the drive as possible, you might
consider running Ontrack Data Recovery tools on the original
drive or on a working drive of the same geometry which contains
a copy of the saved data from step 2. These tools provide a
variety of salvage and analysis techniques superior to most
other dos-based utilities.

4. Expect to analyze a lot of hex dumps of the FATs, Partition Tables
and directories if you have a lot of damage and manually rebuild
what you can

I've gone through this process many times with varying degrees of
success and have found that with considerable effort you can achieve
good results.

Regards,

Michael

On Sep 28, 4:40 pm, "
wrote:
I have an old Seagate ST251 MFM drive that just croaked. While booting
up it made some horrendous "clacking" noises and now I get a drive
failure indication when booting up. It defaults and then I can boot
off a floppy and still get into C: (the first partition) The problem
and where my needed data is drive d and although the drive is there
doing a dir gets you a data error message. Scandisk can't touch it and
Norton says that the FAT is bad and only a low level format can
correct this. Well if I wanted to do a format I wouldn't be interested
in retrieving my data. The OS is DOS 6.2. Does anyone know of a good
utility that I can down load in DOS and that will work with DOS and
give me at least a prayer of getting my data back? And if its a free
utility all the better. Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

Pull the drive out and put it in a linux box or a system that can boot
from CD-ROM, there's plenty of tools you can use to make an image of
the drive, dd, ddrescue, etc. but if it's truly a hardware issue you
may not be able to read it.

If the data is so important you should have backups.

wrote:
On Sep 28, 4:40 pm, "
wrote:

I have an old Seagate ST251 MFM drive that just croaked.

snip


Pull the drive out and put it in a linux box or a system that can boot
from CD-ROM, there's plenty of tools you can use to make an image of
the drive, dd, ddrescue, etc. but if it's truly a hardware issue you
may not be able to read it.


I had resisted suggesting moving an antique MFM drive and controller
or even booting some flavor of *nix on the original machine since
support for the controller may be iffy on newer releases. Certainly
if the O.P. has experience with unix there are all kinds of solutions
for working with intact antique hardware using older releases, but
in this case it would probably be safer to use the DOS-based tools
previously mentioned. On a 386 or better class of PC, one could
even boot a version of NT/2K and use 'unixtools' such as 'dd' for
imaging the ailing drive, or 'diskprobe' for sector editing.

Regards,

Michael

On Sep 29, 10:55 am, msg wrote:
wrote:
On Sep 28, 4:40 pm, "
wrote:

I have an old Seagate ST251 MFM drive that just croaked.

snip

Pull the drive out and put it in a linux box or a system that can boot
from CD-ROM, there's plenty of tools you can use to make an image of
the drive, dd, ddrescue, etc. but if it's truly a hardware issue you
may not be able to read it.

I had resisted suggesting moving an antique MFM drive and controller
or even booting some flavor of *nix on the original machine since
support for the controller may be iffy on newer releases. Certainly
if the O.P. has experience with unix there are all kinds of solutions
for working with intact antique hardware using older releases, but
in this case it would probably be safer to use the DOS-based tools
previously mentioned. On a 386 or better class of PC, one could
even boot a version of NT/2K and use 'unixtools' such as 'dd' for
imaging the ailing drive, or 'diskprobe' for sector editing.

Regards,

Michael

I really appreciate all this great advice. The problem is I'm an
electronics technician and although I do understand most of the
concepts mentioned unfortunately when it comes to some of this stuff
I'm afraid that I'm a bit of an ignoramus. I don't know about sector
editing. I've heard of it but thats all. I may know enough to get
myself into bigger trouble. I don't want to give up but this may be
too much for me to try. Any of you guys live close to New Hampshire by
chance who might have a week or so to spare......? Lenny Stein, Barlen
Electronics.

"Meat Plow" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 18:12:48 -0400, Michael Kennedy wrote:


wrote in message
oups.com...
I have an old Seagate ST251 MFM drive that just croaked. While booting
up it made some horrendous "clacking" noises and now I get a drive
failure indication when booting up. It defaults and then I can boot
off a floppy and still get into C: (the first partition) The problem
and where my needed data is drive d and although the drive is there
doing a dir gets you a data error message. Scandisk can't touch it and
Norton says that the FAT is bad and only a low level format can
correct this. Well if I wanted to do a format I wouldn't be interested
in retrieving my data. The OS is DOS 6.2. Does anyone know of a good
utility that I can down load in DOS and that will work with DOS and
give me at least a prayer of getting my data back? And if its a free
utility all the better. Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.




Am I the only person who is shocked that you still had one of these that
worked? What is this drive in a IBM PC AT?

Well anyhow I agree with what someone else suggested.. Try the old dos
norton, maybe it will work.

Mike

I have an old Seagate boat anchor up in the attic and an RLL controller
that still works AFAIK. Well it did work when it got stuck up there so no
reason why it wouldn't. Even have an old Everex 8088 PC that could host
that drive but I've no desire to mess with it.




Yeah I had loads of old 8088 era stuff.. I wish I had kept it now because
people seem to pay good money for things I threw away 10 years ago.. Oh
well.. I kept a few things out of it all. I've got some MFM and RLL hdd's
but I doubt they work. My favorite is the double decker 5.25" drive. I think
I will put it in my Athlon 3500+ just for fun.

Get Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software to rescue your data
from inaccessible hard drive.
Not a free tool but its give free demo download which let us see the
preview of the data.
A good utility for file and partition recovery, recovering the data
from formatted hard drive, data loses due to software malfunction,
viruses or sabotage.
Download: http://www.stellarinfo.com/spwdr.exe
Product Information: http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm

Hi!

First of all--if you get the data, then by all means, get it off that drive.
I wouldn't be too surprised to hear of a an ST-251 still working, as the
design was cheap and simple.

Unfortunately, these drives used a stepper motor to drive the heads around
the platters. This setup is touchy and subject to drifting out of
calibration over the years due to temperature shifts and drive movement.
When this happens, the stepper can't be positioned to find the data where
the drive and controller think it should be. You then get an error.

Back in "the old days" the suggested procedure was to keep backups, make
regular backups and make a backup prior to moving the drive in any way
whatsoever. It was also suggested to periodically run a low level format on
the drive to "realign" everything, after making a backup and hopefully
before the drive became unable to retrieve data.

As far as a solution goes, I'd highly recommend SpinRite from Gibson
Research Corporation. I never have run it on an ST-251 drive, but it
certainly existed at the time those were popular. I've seen drives that it
could and couldn't save...but the overwhelming majority were anywhere from
much better to completely salvageable. SpinRite costs around $100 USD and
comes with a 30 day money back guarantee if it doesn't work. I have no
affiliation with GRC other than as a satisfied customer of theirs.

William

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:40:32 -0700, "
wrote:

I have an old Seagate ST251 MFM drive that just croaked. While booting
up it made some horrendous "clacking" noises and now I get a drive
failure indication when booting up. It defaults and then I can boot
off a floppy and still get into C: (the first partition) The problem
and where my needed data is drive d and although the drive is there
doing a dir gets you a data error message. Scandisk can't touch it and
Norton says that the FAT is bad and only a low level format can
correct this. Well if I wanted to do a format I wouldn't be interested
in retrieving my data. The OS is DOS 6.2. Does anyone know of a good
utility that I can down load in DOS and that will work with DOS and
give me at least a prayer of getting my data back? And if its a free
utility all the better. Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

Stellar Phoenix works on *most* drives that will spin up. It's not
cheap ($300 for the multi-system version with a USB dongle), but it
*works*.

There's a download-only version for use on one PC that's a little
cheaper.

John