On 18-Sep-08, at 10:29 AM, Peter O'Gorman wrote:
Secure erase overwrites the drives multiple times to ensure that none of
the original information is retrievable.
Yes - if I can write to the drives.
The ideal solution for me, if such a thing exists, would be to run an emulator in a modern machine (Mac, PC or Linux running on Intel), that would be able to access the old drives through hardware that connects the old attachments to USB. Emulators may be available, but I don't know about the hardware.
The drives would be SCSI-1 (5MB/s), there are cables/adaptors that would do it, but I do not have one anymore, ebay is probably your best bet to find one.
Good suggestion. One hard drive cable (an Apple drive) appears to have a 19-pin connector, the same as Apple's floppy drive connector. The second party hard drive has a 25-pin connector (same physical connector for RS-232, but different voltages etc.)
Do you want to copy the data off the drives before the secure erase? Do you happen to know if they are formatted MFS, or HFS? I don't know if there are MFS drivers for linux, but one exists for Mac OS X (readonly, Apple sample code)
I don't know what format, but good to know some drivers are still available. It would be nice, though not critical, to copy the info. If the drivers do not allow me to write to the drives (to destroy the info) then I might have to physically destroy them.
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/MFSLives/index.html. Perhaps someone on the list can lend you a cable, if not, I have an older powermac g3 that has a scsi interface (but I do not have any scsi cables) that you could borrow to do the copy and erase.
Peter
Peter O'Gorman http://pogma.com
Thanks Peter!
On 18-Sep-08, at 10:11 AM, Raymond J. Henry wrote:
I believe I have some SCSI cards kicking around with external ports, would have to check. What connector do those Mac cables use? The centronics type, if I recall rightly. So easy wipe there, plug it into a PC and away you go.
Then if I could get the PC to see the drive at all, could reformat it.
See above re cables.
As for emulating C64, check here: http://www.zzap64.co.uk/c64/c64emulators.html
Thanks - same problem for the 64, ie connecting devices.
Dan Martin GP Hospital Practitioner Computer Scientist ummar143@shaw.ca (204) 831-1746 answering machine always on