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Trying to recover data off an old SCSI drive and some floppies...

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Rajahal:
I'm attempting to recover data from an ancient SCSI drive as well as some boxes of 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disks. The SCSI drive uses the HS50 - 50 Pin Ribbon format, like this:



Are there any SCSI to USB, SCSI to PCI, or SCSI to anything else cables/adapters worth their salt? I've seen products ranging from $10 to $300, but I have no prior experience with any of these things. I do have the 50 pin SCSI cable that I pulled from the computer (hopefully it works, but I have no way of testing it).

I've seen 3.5" floppy drives with a USB interface, so I figure that should be fairly safe, but I'm open to suggestions there as well.  What about 5.25" floppy drives?

Once I do get these old media hooked up to a modern computer, then I'll probably have more questions about how to actually access the data :)  I believe the computer ran Windows 95, but the owners aren't sure.

UhClem:
The Adaptec 2940 was the warhorse of its day (mid- to late-90s). It's a PCI card. A quick check on ebay found 400+ listings!!

(You probably even know someone with one in a closet :).)

Linux and BSD still support it, and WinXP (I haven't tried Win7).

There were a few variations:
2940 - original
2940W - Wide (faster)
2940UW - Ultra Wide (even faster)

Any one will serve your need.

Rajahal:
Thank you! I just ordered a 2940W from an eBay seller for under $15 shipped! Let's hope this puppy works!

Rajahal:
Received the 2940W and installed it in an old test computer I had handy. Windows 7 recognized the card and installed a driver for it, so that seems like a good sign. The SCSI drive does spin and doesn't make any odd noises (more good signs), but it is not recognized by Window's storage manager. The drive is also not recognized in BIOS as far as I can tell.

I tried GetDataBack, both the NTFS and FAT incarnations. Neither recognized the SCSI drive. As I understand it, even the oldest versions of Windows ran on either FAT or NTFS, so I'm out of ideas. At this point I'm not sure if the drive itself is to blame, the SCSI cable, or the card. Any ideas? The only hardware replacements I could make would be a new cable and/or a new card, but as far as I can tell the card seems to be working.

UhClem:
You might try some "live" version of Linux or BSD. (I doubt that unRAID has the 294x driver). After booting the OS, do a "dmesg > KMSG" and look at file KMSG to determine the /dev/XXX name for the scsi drive; hopefully, it is there.

Then you can use "dd if=/dev/XXX of=/dev/null bs=1M count=250"
just to be sure it is readable. Then a "fdisk -l /dev/XXX" to identify the partitioning. If good so far, mount the partition(s) read-only and have a look-see.

Good luck.

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