Re: [HELP] Hard drive on a //e

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Cheezy asked:

>I got my //e a while ago and it came with several cards in it and a hard
>drive. The two cards i didn't know were what happened to be a CP/M card (i
>could tell by a photo I saw on MacOldies french website) while the other
>seemed to be the card for the hard drive, with a ribbon connector from the
>card to the drive. All this stuff, except the CP/M card, seems to come from
>the same company: SyMBiotic. I discovered that the drive, called SyMBfile
>was actually a 10 MB MFM hard drive.
>
>I put the drives controller card in slot 5 and when I type "PR#5" it runs a
>program that lets me access BASIC/ PASCAL / CPM on the drive. There are lots
>of files on it but I don't know what to do with all this. Can the drive be
>used to save regular Apple // files ?

Yes, it can.  The BASIC region is probably DOS 3.3-compatible,
since I think the drive predates ProDOS.

My only concern would be that the MFM drive is very old, and
you cannot anticipate a long useful life for it at this point.

If it were mine, I would get another high-capacity drive (SCSI,
CompactFlash, Focus,...) and copy the contents of the drive
to a new medium as soon as possible.  Of course, there is a
problem with the multi-OS nature of the drive, which is difficult
to replicate with more modern drives.  If the amount of info stored
on a "partition" (probably not like we mean partition today) is
small, then it could be copied to something smaller that the
OS can handle, like floppies.

Alternatively, if you have terminal software for each OS, you
could null-modem the data to a PC for archival storage.

-michael

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