I have a number of internal 8-bit SCSI-1 drives that I'd like to archive for historical purposes. These are all the old NeXT Cubes and NeXTStations (monochrome and color) that were used by id Software to create DOOM and Quake. I'd like to donate the machines somewhere they can do some good, but John Carmack had me promise more than a decade ago that I'd wipe the drives if I ever passed them along, and I'd hate to lose any priceless data that's on them.
In theory, I realize SCSI is backwards compatible, and so I may just be able to plug it into an appropriate cable & modern SCSI card...
But I suspect that it's not quite that simple, and further, it's not obvious what type of cable or adapter I would need and where to acquire one.
If I successfully do extract the data, I'll ping John and see if it might be ok to release the disk images to the public. It's his data, so it'll be his call. id has open-sourced much of their code, so there might not be anything useful here, but the geek in me would hate to lose it if there is. :)
Old NeXT hardware. SWOON!
Getting a SCSI2 -> SCSI 1 adapter should be trivial. There were both internal and external varieties. Google is your friend. For some reason I thought the "newer" slabs should be SCSI2 but it's been a long time.
You still have to terminate the SCSI chain. Keep to addresses 0-7.
Further just Googling for "scsi-2 pci card" comes up with hits. An Adaptec card for instance should still have good working SCSI support on linux. Looks like one can be had for ~$20.
Here's the thing tho. How the heck are you going to read the file system using anything BUT NeXTSTEP? I suppose you might be able to boot an old NeXTSTEP/OpenStep Intel cd, and ftp/scp/rsync over the files you're looking to save after you've mounted the drive. The trick would probably be finding an Adaptec card which OpenStep supported.
Good luck!
I've got a NeXTStation slab, and I'm trying figure out why it doesn't boot. I removed the drive from the NeXTStation and installed it in old PC (IBM Z Pro) with an onboard UltraWide SCSI controller. I found an adapter which converts from the 80-pin UW-connector to the old style 50-pin connector used by SCSI-1 drives. Other obvious choices could be digging up an SCSI-1 controller. If it's a NeXTStation slab, the drive is probably already terminated with SIL-style resistors, so you don't need any on the SCSI cable.
I booted up the system and the drive was detected as /dev/sdc. Before doing anything else, I took a complete backup of the entire drive like this:
It's a Seagate ST1280 drive, so the resulting file was around 238MB. After this, I manually added the ufs module to the kernel, although this may not be necessary:
I'm running Fedora 21, so the ufs module was part of the kernel-modules-extra package. After this, the disk can be mounted with this command:
The UFS module installed from kernel-modules-extra only supports read only though, as seem with dmesg:
If you need to mount it read-write, you probably need to recompile the kernel and/or module.
Do the machines boot? It's quite easy to get them up on a modern network and tar/transfer the data via NFS...here's a picture of mine w/ my NAS/RAID mounted: http://hzsystems.com/scrap/nextnfsmount.jpg
You should indeed be able to plug them into any SCSI-1 or SCSI-2 device chain and then wipe them from there. However, if the machines boot, then what I'd do is to export a shared folder over NFS from a machine with enough space to hold the contents of the drives, then tar the complete contents of the drives to the shared folder, and then run dd to wipe them.
You might want to install gnu tar first, assuming that Carmack left you with gcc on the box, because the version of tar installed with NeXTStep has trouble with pathnames longer than either 255 or 1024 characters - I forget which.
I'd bet they boot. My own cube still does.
These can be read on a linux PC with a SCSI adapter. I would be willing to do it if you're close.
The best resource about these matters is the ClassicCmp mailing list (http://www.classiccmp.org/) - a very active community of very knowledgeable and technical people. Post to the list; I'm sure someone will be close enough to help.
The easiest solution is to read the drives on the original NeXT equipment. I have three NeXTStations color, and I would expect two of them to be fully operational, although I did not check that for many years. Please let me know how I can be of help - I am in AZ and CA.
As noted above, the easiest thing to do is dump them using an existing NeXT box. I have an external drive that I plug disks into, and dump the image using dd, cpio and tar, then FTP the images to my archive box. I do the same thing for MO/OD images (I have working drives). If you have a dual drive 50 pin cable, you can get by without the external drive.
Alternatively, if you can find an older pci adaptec 50 pin card, and plug it into a Linux box, you'll be able to dd the image in Linux, and later mount the disk using a loop back on Linux. In some ways this is better because dd on the NeXT doesn't dump the entire disk.
If you have trouble, I'd be willing to help or even dump the drives for you. I've done that for a bunch of people/companies.