recovering hard drives information

[Will-i-am]

The other day I looked at the stack of old hard drives I have and it occured to me that one of them likely has that great anim my daughter made when she was about 6-7 years old on "The Talking Animator". She worked on it for a long time and it was very advanced for her age. She even figured out how to have words that you couldn't see but the Amiga would speak. Anyway the thing never got backed up because it was too big for a floppy or something and when the drive fried I thought it was gone for sure but I kept the drive "just in case". Now I know there are utilities and services that can recover information from a hard drive, people in the PC world do it for businesses all the time. In fact the government sometimes throws out old hard drives that happy techy guys grab from the dump and recover classified information.

But what do Amigans do with drives that just stop working if the information contained therein is important enough? Is there a way to get that animation or is it as dead as we thought? It was off my A2000, originally on a Supra board, scsi and all that. The card was okay because my buddy Larry sent me a new drive and we just connected it and away we went. Somebody out there know if we have a chance? She has mentioned that animation and some others she made many times and since she's about to graduate from college with an art degree I thought it would make a nice gift.

[Will-i-am]

Merc wrote:
Did you try to salvage any data from the drive at the time with Disksalv or QB Tools?  That might work unless the drive is totally dead.  You could connect it to a PC with a SCSI card and try the same with WinUAE I suppose too.

The drive was flat freakin dead. No pulse. Booting with a Workbench disk and using HDToolbox showed no sign of the dead drive. We thought it might be the card so we started testing the card with a drive we knew to be alive. It went up just fine. My thinking is that since the drive is not much more than a big fat floppy the physical makeup of the little magnetic particles should be relatively unchanged and maybe the mechanism that reads the drive is trashed but mightn't there be some way to mount the platters into another mechanism and then read the data off to another working drive? That was the thrust of my thinking.

Hmmm, re the Winuae, it might be something I could try if I had a PC that could handle scsi drives and was powerful enough to run the emulator, but what I have here is an old Sony Vaio I got when my sister upgraded. Once my daughter goes to school in Europe later in the month, she says I can take over the PC she owns, which is powerful enough to run WinUAE and I can try something from there if it's possible, but I'm not sure what to do about the scsi compatibility. As little Eva once said, "I don't know nothin' bout mounting no scsi's, Miss Scarlett!"

[Will-i-am]

yeah, I thought this would be... interesting... but wottheheck, one more curious project to approach. I suppose I could take the old A2000 apart, assuming it's not the A2000 currently up and running. It would be a shame to operate on that one now that everything seems to work right.
But there are 2 more over there and if one of them is the right one, then I'll test the old HD and see what gives. I suppose there should be a way to check the various parts as well... my friend across the street does stuff like that for paper mill computers and I sold him my Willys Jeep for half what I originally paid for it. (My back has gotten to a point where crawling under trucks repairing master cylinders is not an option.) If the drive does not spin up or anything, which might be the case, I couldn't exactly lose anything by going deeper into the mechanisms.
Wish Larry was still alive, he had stacks of old HDs in his office, that's how I got a good replacement. Well, I'll just have to do the best I can. If anything comes of this I'll post a follow-up

[Will-i-am]

If you're desperate to get at the animation without paying hundreds of dollars then maybe you've got nothing to lose - just do your vacuuming the night before (to allow airborne dust to settle), take a shower and wear a hairnet.

:-) :-) :-)

okay, okay I can take all kinds of ideas from the silly to the sublime but the idea that I might have to dust my house, jump in the shower and wear a hairnet in order to see my daughter's 15 year old animation.... unless there's dust in the house. Dust in the House?? Son, I have dustballs under this desk that have begun to evolve thumbs! Just the other day one offered to install Jet Set Billy on the A2000! I DID find another data disk with one of her anims but so far it looks like the dead scsi HD is the most likely repository of the nice long one with teddy bear's building houses and such. I have a plan, but it involves the two newest antique A2000's and their HDs. No, I can't justify paying anyone to try to extract the data the scientific way. We're gonna try the tried and true 'whack it with a stick' kind of approach, or a variation of it: 'plug it in, turn it on. Plug it in again differently, turn it on...' etc. might work and it beats dusting the room.

[Will-i-am]

Hyperspeed wrote:

Anyway, good luck finding the animation. I found an old animation in my disk box recently made with Deluxe Paint 4 AGA... never worked out how to add sound to coordinate with the frames...

:-)

Re the sound thing, there's an old great animation editor called Animation Station that I used on my A2000s and it was the easiest thing you ever saw for coordinating sound to frames. I've seen other programs where you essentially write a script and that works great but AS was (and still is) so simple. Each frame could be called up as a single image on the screen with a list of things relating to that frame. So a particular sound or text or voice, could be hooked to that event. It always worked, was dirt simple to change and the only complaint I ever had with it was when I upgraded to 3.1 with my A4000D. Then it broke.

There was also this ancient program, shareware of course, I think it was German, had a funny name like "M" or some such thing.... but it was similar in set up but the thing that amazed me was not only how each frame could carry various events like sound file start and sound file end... so the sound was stretched over the frames in between, but it could play huge animations very very fast. I tried a multi-hundred  frame 2 color anim, just shadows on a white background and it was shooting em on the screen at about 60fps for the smoothest anims. I think Animation Station evolved into Anim Workshop, which I acquired in a garage sale awhile back only to find that it requires a keyfile to run and the company has since folded (of course). So if anybody has said keyfile around I would be exceptionally happy to trade for it.