Just a tad disappointed. I was hoping that this blog post would have been a glorious annoucement that I was able to recover my old BBS from retirement and have it running (since taking it down some 18 years ago) through either UAE or WinUAE, but alas no.
After waiting almost a month for an Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI controller to arrive from the States, I was able to get the drive (A Micropolis 4110 1GB) running into Linux quite quickly. And given that Linux (in this case, Ubuntu 12.04LTS) is able to read AFFS volumes it was appearing that this just may work. I’m not entirely sure if it was the drive itself or a corrupted Rigid Disk Block, it was unfortunate that I was unable to get it mounted properly before it seemingly died through what I can only assume may have been excessive heat generation. The drive was extremely warm to touch after only 30 minutes or so of running and after that it produced no response at all. So as it is now, I may consider professional data recovery but I’m not sure it’s really worth the expense for what is actually just a nostalgia hit.
Never the less, I happened upon this photo a few months ago which was pretty much the impetus to encouraging me to revive the old board. It’s a photo of LightSpeed BBS from mid’95 during the board’s prime. Many many hours were spent here. Some heart ache at times but generally much enjoyment was had for both myself and the board’s callers.
At this stage LightSpeed BBS consisted of
Amiga A2000/040 @ 33mhz
16meg Ram
I/O Extender
1GB Micropolis SCSI Hard Drive
1GB Conner SCSI Hard Drive
2x 330meg Quantum SCSI Hard Drives
1x Double Speed SCSI Cd-Rom
2x Single Speed SCSI Cd-Rom
1 External Double Speed SCSI Cd-Rom drive (on loan from Amiga Christchurch Inc)
2x 28.8k SupraFaxModems
1x 14.4k SupraFaxModem
KTX SVGA 14″ monitor
Running Xenolink 1.98
This was networked with a
486 DX4-100
8meg Ram
540meg Hard Drive
Running Remote Access BBS
So fun times were the BBS days and it’s good to see a few locals still maintaining the old ways at a time when things were just a little bit different, fun and a little more exciting.
First Choice Core BBS @ 1stchoicecore.co.nz
and The Trashcan @ bbs.thenet.gen.nz:2323
Here are some links that I’ve found useful in my expedition to revive an Amiga drive without an Amiga machine.
Making a backup of an Amiga SCSI drive
Amiga Recovery Linux Application
Mount an AFFS drive within Ubuntu
Mount an AFFS Drive under Linux
** UPDATE: **
I gave in and sent the drive away to be checked over with the hope that perhaps the data could be recovered off it. I selected Digital Recovery in Hamilton, NZ for the task and they were mighty quick in diagnosing the fault and getting back to me.
Unfortunately, there was good news and bad news. The good news was they found the faults along with a suspected root cause, and they were able to repair it. Yay! But in order to repair it, we’d have to obtain an exact identical drive off eBay to pillage the necessary parts from. The trouble was, the cheapest we were able to find was going to set me back $180 which on it’s own isn’t that bad but factor in the data recovery cost plus what I’d already spent on the SCSI controller and the sum cost of this exercise was starting to climb to over $700NZD.
I got advice from friends, and also my partner Nikki and the answer was the same throughout. “You should be thinking about today’s tech, and not yesterdays tech” was a common theme.
So the drive has been returned and is sitting in a safe place until such time as something good happens. I’m sure I will return to this venture sometime in the future, but for the time being I’ll just have to wait and see.