How to read an Acorn harddrive

Hi Everyone,

I’m not sure if I’ve come to the right place, but I wonder if someone here can help or point me in the right direction. I have a collection of files going back to university days, stored on an old harddrive which I had in an A5000. I would now like to retrieve the files, but unfortunately don’t have access to any Acorn hardware any more. What’s the easiest way of going about this please? Is there some way I can connect the harddrive to my laptop via USB and read the files – either directly, or via some kind of emulator.

Any suggestions gratefully received!

Many thanks,

Tom

There’s a guide here about using Linux to recover files from ADFS formatted hard discs (see also this forum thread that spawned the guide). So if you can boot your laptop into Linux (an Ubuntu live CD will do), and have an external hard drive enclosure (easy enough to come by from most computer hardware shops), then there’s a good chance you’ll be able to get your files back.

There are basically two methods to recovering the files from within Linux – you can either mount the drive using the Linux ADFS driver, but I don’t think the current version of the driver allows you to copy the files off while preserving the filetypes. The kernel module containing the driver may not be supplied with all Linux distributions either (But I do know it comes with Ubuntu).

The second method is to use ‘dd’ to create an image of the entire disc – this will allow you to mount it under an emulator (of which there are many) and copy the files off that way via the emulators ‘HostFS’ capability. Plus it’ll give you a chance to convert the files to a format that’s more suitable for the Windows/Mac/Linux dominated world. However the guide I linked to mostly concentrates on the ‘mount the drive using the ADFS driver’ method, so you might have to do your own research into how to correctly use dd (i.e. how to avoid accidentally bricking your laptop!)

I’m not sure if there are any ways of reading the disc from within Windows or Mac OS - I suspect there’ll be some way of creating a disc image similar to the ‘dd’ method, but it’s never something I’ve had to try myself.

If you have any further questions then the Icon Bar forums might be the best place to ask – the site gets a fair amount of traffic from people looking to resurrect their old Acorn kit.

Many thanks for the reply Jeff. What is ‘dd’please – some kind of Linux app / utility?

Hi Tom, dd is a Linux/GNU commandline utility that can copy blocks of data and does that using a quite low level method.

Using dd requires knowledge of the data format of the drive. For example your harddrive has been connected over usb and is detected as /dev/sda then the simplest way to invoke dd for copying your harddrive will be:

dd if=/dev/sda of=harddrive.adf bs=512

This will copy the entire disk into a file called harddrive.adf more info can be read at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_%28Unix%29