There are multiple sorts of hard and floppy disks which were used by the Smaky computers. It can be a bit difficult to read some disks according to their very old interface, like for example the Winchester hard disks.
For Smaky 100 and more, it's easier because mostly are using SCSI interfaces and usual 5"1/4 or 3"1/2 floppy devices.
For SCSI hard disk, you can use an Adaptec SCSI Card 29160 controller for example. It's using a PCI slot and it's very common. This controller is perfectly compatible with the Linux kernel. A lot of other controller will be fine too, of course; just try...
For 3"1/2 floppy disks, it's still possible to buy floppy devices that can be plugged in USB.
About the 5"1/4 floppy disks it depends the generation; probably that Smaky 6 and Smaky 8 floppy disks are not readable with common 5"1/4 devices.
Prefer Linux, it's possible with Windows but it's more complicated. Maybe you have no choice (no kernel support for the hardware). If it's the case, use Windows until you have your raw dump and go back under Linux after that.
If you can plug your disk on the PC, then you have done most of the hard work. Now the first step is to realize a raw dump of the disk. The extractions will be done on the image disk and never with the disk itself.
The simple way is just to use dd. But first, look at dmesg where is you disk
in the system, the use dd as it:
# must be run as root (sudo)
dd if=/dev/sdX of=smaky.diReplace the X of sdX by the right value according to the dmesg output.
Be very careful here, if is for input file and of for output file. If
you invert both options, you will destroy your data.
Please, continue to read this article, it's not the best way...
It's not always the best idea to just use dd because maybe the disk is
damaged (and it's old, prone to mechanical, eletric or electronic failures).
Then the best way will be to use myrescue instead of dd. This utility
tries to read as much as possible and keep a map of damaged area in order to
improve the rescue (re-rescue) and to be quick and more safe.
First, read the manpage of myrescue, the procedure is very important.
You can install it via apt-get install myrescue.
# must be run as root (sudo)
myrescue -S /dev/sdX smaky.di
# continue this procedure if errors were encountered
myrescue -f1 /dev/sdX smaky.di # repeat this command until the number of errors seems to have converged
# if necessary, you can repeat with more retry on the damaged blocks
myrescue -f1 -r3 /dev/sdX smaky.di # for example, it retries 3xOnce this step is done, shutdown your computer and unplug everything. You have done the most critical step; congrats.
There are multiple possibilities here. You can try to load the smaky.di image
in the Smaky Infini emulator. It's very easy and it works most of time. But
if the Smaky Infini is unable to mount your image, it's an other story. It
needs to understand how works the FOS (File Operating System) in order to
recover with EDISK for example. An other disasvantage it's that it's not very
efficient to copy quickly all files from the Smaky system to the host system
with the emulator.
The Smaky Infini works on Linux by using WINE.
Then I've written a tool which is able to read Smaky FOS image disks just with your Linux system. This tool works (for some parts) on Windows but in this case you lose the great advantage of FUSE. Then I recommand to work only on Linux.
This tool is named Fosfat and it's available in the official Debian
repositories (thanks to Didier Raboud). You can install it just by typing
apt-get install fosfat in your terminal. Fosfat is available since 2006.
There are four commands:
| commands | |
|---|---|
fosread |
frontend to list/get files from the image disk |
fosmount |
mount the image disk in the filesystem (FUSE) |
fosrec |
restore deleted files |
smascii |
convert Smaky text encoding to ISO-8859-1 |
Now, just mount your image disk somewhere.
# create a directory for the mount point
mkdir ~/smaky
# just mount
fosmount smaky.di ~/smakyWith fosmount, the image disk is mount in your filesystem in the ~/smaky
directory. Now you can browse the directory like any other directory on your
system.
There is a funny feature here, you can mount the disk image with
fosmount -i -joptions. In this case, the.IMAGEare converted (on the fly) to.PBMand.COLORto.XPMimages. These formats can be read directly with GIMP. The advantage is that it's not necessary to use the Smaky Infini emulator for converting these files.
When you have done, just unmount with fusermount or umount.
fusermount -u ~/smakyThe Fosfat commands try to read as much as possible all blocks that looks fine in the file system. Even if your disk is damaged, it's possible to read a lot of files where the Smaky Infini will just refuse to mount your disk or read files which look unavailable.
If a file can be read just partially, then Fosfat will read this file until it's no longer possible. You can try to fix this file yourself because it's possible to open/copy damaged files.
An other interesting command is fosrec. this command browses the whole image
disk and extract all files marked as deleted even if the files are cropped. It's
the undelete feature, available via the fosread command too.
When you extract text files, you can directly open these files in a text editor but a problem will appear. Extended characters are not decoded correctly. It's because the Smaky uses it's own charset (just unknown by the text editors). It looks like western europe ASCII but it's not that.
You can use the smascii command in order to convert the text from Smaky
encoding to ISO-8859-1 encoding.
smascii smaky_text unix_text --unixBy using --unix, the carriage return \r will be converted to line feed \n.
Yes, the Smaky uses only the carriage return like old Macintosh.