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Build a Cheap Media-Reading PC?
tsm_sf writes "A recent Slashdot article got me thinking about dead and dying media. I'd like to build a cheap PC with the goal of being able to read as many old formats as possible. Size and power consumption would be design considerations; priority of media formats would be primary. How would you approach such a project?"
Or, several of them.
Archive format of the future:
http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/
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What's wrong with getting a commodity PC, a couple of USB hubs and as many adapters as you can lay your hands on? Most every connection I can think of has a USB adapter for it..
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Get yourself a big tower case and one of each of these: 5.25" floppydrive, Zip-drive, Travan tape-reader, Creative tape-drive, DAT tapedrive, single speed cd-rom (for these *really* pesky cd's), dvd+/-RW. And a 77-in-1 flashmemory readers.
Then, make sure you have a parallel port, a serial port and a game port (there is actually backup media that connects to the game port, what where they thinking).
After the hardware, start with software: DOS, Win'98se, Win2000, WinXP at least. Then Linux (drivers for almost any filing system) and, i kid you not, FreeBSD (very good drivers for obscure hardware, especially backup hardware).
That's a start, at least.
You probably want a motherboard wit as many PCI slots as possible. Depending on your needs, you might even need to find a motherboard that has one of those rogue ISA slots. I'd browse around ebay and geeks.com to look for such gnarly old hardware. If you could find a motherboard that had
A quick google found this:
Gigabyte Ga-6Vtxea
Gigabyte Ga-6Vtxea ; Via 694T , On-Board Ac97 Audio , Ata100 ; 3X 168Pin Dimm, 5X Pci, 1X Isa, 1X Agp, 1 X Amr
That would be right up your alley. It probably has serial ports as well. Wow, it's pretty: image
They don't make them like that anymore.
From there, get one PCI card with USB support, get a/multiple usb hubs... grab some parallel and/or serial to usb adaptors.
Don't forget to track down a scsi card for one of the pci slots, among other random interface cards.
Usually to read old media, you wouldn't start by building a PC. The first thing is the hardware that works with the media, for example a reel to reel tape drive, 8, 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 inch floppy drive, tape drive for old cartridge tape formats etc. Then you look at the interface needed to work that old hardware, then you look at what computer you need to host that interface, then an operating system, then the tools needed to get to and make sense of the data.
Luckily the OS part is pretty easy. Linux has support for all sorts of weird and wonderful interfaces right out of the box. It's also usually packaged with all manner of powerful tools good for getting data off old media.
It's getting old hardware to actually work that'll challenge you.
Expect all old media to contain lots of errors, and expect media readers to die. I would focus on migrating from old media to hard-disk based storage since old floppys, tapes and CDs have a limited lifespan. I would also have multiple readers for the same format since a CD that doesn't work in one reader might work in another.
I personally would go for a bigtower with multiple 5.25" and 3.5" floppy readers, CD-rom reader, a memory card reader, dvd/blueray and HD-DVD reader and 2 x 1 TB Harddrives in mirror raid to ensure that no migrated data is lost.
Some media might be unreadable my modern OS:s. Equip the machine with enough memory to run virtual machines which are given direct access to the media readers. If you need DOS to read a diskette, boot the DOS vm.
This takes some work to set up, but will give you a lot of control over your power consumption.
As has been mentioned before, a lot of older readers are IDE devices, and so, can easily be converted to USB. (Note that for IDE, the device must be plugged in and powered when the system boots, otherwise it won't be recognized.)
After converting to USB, splice in relays - on the device power cable and the USB +5V cable (to prevent the device from half-powering-up via USB power). Connect the relay control to the appropriate voltage via a pushbutton switch which you can mount on the front of your computer (can sacrifice a drive bay for a panel of switches).
This will let you turn each device on and off as you want.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Catweasel disk controller yet. http://www.jschoenfeld.com/products/catweasel_e.htm Its a hard to find board since its done in limited production runs.
A good start is to get a Catweasel floppy controller. If you connect a 3", a 3.5", a 5.25" and a 8" floppy drive to it you will be able to read almost any floppy disk there is, including C64, Amiga, CP/M, CPC, Mac, Apple II, Famicom and so on.
Then comes the bigger problem: Finding the tools to extract files from their filesystems. There are small extraction/conversion tools on the net for almost every format there is, collecting dust on long forgotten areas of FTP servers. Some of them require some slight modifications to compile on post-80s UNIX and some only run in MSDOS with full hardware access, but with some patience, DOSBox, Google and imgtool from MESS you should be able to work with most of them.
Then finally comes the biggest problem: Finding applications that can work with the actual files...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.