xebec/apple questions

[bje@ripco.com (Bruce Esquibel)]

Hello, forgive the stupidity but it appears I have forgotten more than I
thought. Long story but will try to make it short.

Back in the 80's I used to run a bbs on an apple ][ using a home brew hard
drive system. In 1990 due to a bunch of stupidity from the feds, it was
seized (google it, operation sundevil), returned in 1994 minus all the
floppies and software. Since then its been stored away, never attempted to
try to put it back together.

Going on the one-in-a-million chance that the hard drive is still
functional after 14+ years of sleep, I've always wondered if the data was
recoverable, more for historical reasons than anything else.

Although I could try to "get it running" again using what I have and ebay
what I don't, there isn't much point without the software. And that is what
I'm wondering if anyone out there still has this stuff.

Like I said, the hard drive was homebrew, always was. I think the host
adapter and "controller" (usually mounted above the hd itself) were sourced
directly from Xebec. It probably was the same as the Sider hardware using
different firmware. Which is the problem now.

The whole thing booted oddly from what I remember. From a cold start the
floppy in slot6 booted the dos 3.3 and probably loaded something. Then it
did a PR#5 and booted the hd into prodos and ran the bbs program. There was
some other weird stuff, like when a user went into the file transfer
section, the modem was held "on-line" while the machine rebooted into dos,
ran Ascii Express (I think) then started the whole mess over again when they
hung up.

Beleive it or not I wrote that whole mess over years of experimenting and
trying to get the bbs self-running and crash-free. These days it would
appear I wouldn't know what to do at the ] prompt if my life counted on it.

So the questions...

The drive itself is a Seagate ST4096, which at the time was a monster, 80
megs formatted but I think the partitions (/hard1 /hard2) were limited to
32megs each. The other 16 megs might of been dos for the ae line, not sure
anymore. 

I know the hd could not boot the machine directly, it needed that floppy to
boot first and I'm pretty sure there was something on it besides dos, maybe
a patch. It's possible the file name was all numeric, like 8900976 or
8900976.bin. Maybe it executed, maybe the data from the file was "poked" in
somewhere. It's also possible those files were firmware (eprom images) that
were burned into the controller to support different drives and were not
needed for booting.

Does anyone remember this stuff using the xebec controllers and mfm drives
from that era? Are the Xebec drive utilities still floating around anywhere?

What I'd like to do is get a new drive (cough), try to get the machine
running and add in the antique as a 2nd drive for safety (rather than trying
to boot it directly).

Either that or is there anyone reliable (and knows what they are doing) with
a setup already that can extract the files out there? 

Like I said, it's sort of a snapshot of history (to me anyway) I'd like to
try to preserve.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com