Hello Folks,
Currently in Somerset, New Jersey (for about a week) and in urgent need to transfer a number of crucial files effectively stranded the 02 GB hard drive of NeXTstation Turbo Color. Hoping to buy and/or borrow at least for a couple of hours a system with a working floppy drive that would allow for at least Sneaker Net transfers, and where the hard drive running NS 3.3 can be swapped to accomplish this.
Backstory Bits:
No computer is an island. Unfortunately, this pretty much seems to be the case at the moment as we have a NeXTstation Turbo Color that 21" megapixel monitor has gone out after close to 20 years of service. Trying to obtain an LCD that works and supports the SOG and scan rate have been a challenge but at least one a few that still ship have been identified. The issue is that they are extremely expensive and considering that these can be funds used to acquire more modern Apple systems on the horizon. We did obtain a Samsung that we were assured was suppose to work but it did not support the right scan rate so the screen kept blanking after about 40 seconds but would allow brief windows to be on the system. Now there is the money tied up for likely the next two weeks in order to obtain a refund.
Moreover, we discovered that the floppy drive isn't working anymore. Add to this that efforts to connect via dial-up and modem as had been done regularly in the past just does not seem to want to accept our log-in with using the area access numbers. (Trying to troubleshoot a dial-up connection at $1 USD per call at a hotel can get expensive rapidly.) Finally, efforts to configure a TCP/IP connection with a MS Windows laptop that happens to be available have proved highly unsuccessful, and though the connection seem to register according to the commands that check the status of things – no telnet, ftp, etc.
If the files you want are on the first slice of the disk (which is almost certainly true if the disk is less than 2 GB), you can put the disk in any PC system with a SCSI card and then boot the PC in Linux using a CD-ROM or, at worst, using a HD that you have installed Linux on, and mount the NEXTSTEP disk using
mount -t ufs -o ufstype=nextstep,ro /dev/sda1 /mnt
and then copy files off to a floppy, other HD, or other computer on the network.
The kernel on that system needs to have the UFS filesystem compiled in as a module or directly in the kernel.
sovdoc,
I am right in Bedminster, NJ, down the road from you, I have a ND Turbo cube with working floppy and the works.
I will PM you my number, You are more than welcome to come to my home and do what you need.
Give me a call.
Jeff
If you could get a disk image of the drive (using a Windows/DOS-based DD utility, and, of course, a SCSI interface card), you could use my utility to list and extract files off the disk image.
See the thread at
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1667
I've also found that to avoid situations like this, one of the packages I install right at the beginning is the DHCP package. I've lost the monitor to my cube, but after a long time in storage, I booted the cube headless, attached to my network backbone, and can still use telnet/ftp to access the box.
Sovdoc was able to get his files out. We could not use any of the ideas above.
But we did formulate a great method. Was fast to do as well.
I actually found it to be quite fun, and he was a really great guy!
Thanks all!
Jeff
I haven't enough knowledge of Hardware but here i got some useful and worthy stuff.