Great forum. My first post and I wander if anybody can help?
I believe from several threads that the NeXT optical drive is compatible with the Canofile Canon 502m Optical disks. In short the NeXT drive is a Canon L10130 Drive. Canon, NeXT and Steve Jobs had some crossover history.... I need the contents of a single disk dumping to a memory stick.
Happy to pick up the postage costs if anybody can help? :?:
Is this in the canofile disk format? I have the drives, but not the canofile software required to get the images off.
Yep. Its a disk generated on a Canofile 510 scanner / optical disk system. i have a Canon drive but no software. Unlike a normal optical disk drive you can't just insert the disk and view the contents. It implies that the disk is not formatted although it is.
I believe that an old Japanese file format was used.
I had hoped by putting it in a NeXT drive it would recognise the file system and allow a method to extract the data.
Any thoughts??
No, unfortunately it's not quite that simple. The next can not natively read the canofile format. The formats are incompatible at the drive controller level. Next used a custom ECC implementation. What we could do is probably take a direct image of the disk. At least then it's a software problem to try to decode the format. I have both the next and external canon drives in working order. I should mention that if this is important data you may be better off using a recovery service. The are companies which offer this service for <$100 per disk.
For example:
http://www.statco.com/services/image-conversion/canofile/
Thanks for that information. Very interesting. You know your stuff!
I can't use the recovery company option as the disk is pass-worded and over 25 years old we have no idea what it is. We have tried lava lamp, bee gees, disco and flares! These companies have an automated process that as you mention which involves a specialist software. The problem is that it needs the password. They have all therefore said no password no service.
Therefore we hope to get the data off the disk through the side door and although it will be all over the place try and extract the images from what we find.
Do you think this will be possible from the 'disk image' that you suggest as an option?
I honestly have no idea how the password would work. Hopefully someone else can answer.
Even with the proper drive attached to a pc, I do not remember their being a readable file format. From what I remember there was a special driver that had to be installed in order to access the canofile media. I did not think the password locked access to the media itself, just the indexing/metatdata stored in the databases by the software. Granted its been 20 years or so since I worked with the Canofile devices and the Canofile for Windows software, so hard to be more specific. Unfortunately I sold or recycled all my Canofile hardware and software years ago, so cant even test things out.
If you have talked to a Canofile conversion service like statco and they cannot move forward without the password, then you might be done. As a last hope you could ask them if they can dump the files and folder structure as-is off the disk for you, and see what you can find. Be aware that document management vendors from that time period often did intentional scrambling or other means of obfuscation to the image data to keep other vendors from being able to access the data easily. That way you would have to pay them to get your data out. Sort of a "hostage fee" to keep you as a customer, since few thought to ask or read the fine print.
There are some utilities for Canofile conversion, but they're custom SCSI drivers, more or less. A standard SCSI will not work...
Quote from: "gtnicol"There are some utilities for Canofile conversion, but they're custom SCSI drivers, more or less. A standard SCSI will not work...
That tracks with what I remember gtnicol.
Was thinking about it last night and I thought once you installed the Canofile for windows software the disk could then be seen in windows explorer or a dos prompt. Cant remember if the software had to be running at the time though.
Got a new angle on this. Any help would be appreciated.
The only machine I have that 'recognises' the Canon Diskfile Drive is Windows 98. I have XP, 7 and 10 also.
When I try and attach the Canon Diskfile Drive via a SCSI card to XP and up it is not recognised or listed as a drive in explorer or device manager.
Am I missing a driver? Does anybody have this up and running on XP or above that can help me??
I am trying to use 'dd for windows' a Linux replicator to take an image of the disk in the Canon drive as a work around. Trouble is 'dd for windows' does not allow dd --list so that i can find the name of the Canon drive input the script at the DOS prompt and extract the contents.
Any thoughts would be great. I have been working this problem for weeks now and running out of hair!
The Canofile was an early 90's product. By the time XP came around it was long past End of Life so presumably only drivers for Windows 9x exist and for 2000 and above the best it can do is try and give you a "close-enough" driver as XP shipped with a pretty basic but universal MO drive driver.
In a case like this if you want a dd image I'd just find an older Live CD version of Ubuntu and use the dd command from there. It will likely not mount the disk but you'll be able to at least image the raw volume.
My approach would be , make a clone of hardware box, identical os, load the drivers, find the manual or look to conversion services . When stymied by a password call Canon and ask for a possible workaround but itmay be in the manual. I used google found I have the original brochure which describes the hardware. I found what appears to be a driver download , found what appears to be a canofile users manual.
http://lastmanuals.com/manual/CANON/CANOFILE-WINDOWShttp://www.blackholeinc.com/docs/nextservicemanualsection4opticaldrive/CanofileForWindows_Brochure.pdf Original Canofile brochure
Possible driver for download
http://canofile-for-windows.software.informer.com/2.5/#topA friend of mine here in town recently extracted data from a lot of old optical disks for CSU but I'm not sure of the formatting issues and password protection . I'm guessing going this route may be expensive -$500 + a disk and if it is proprietary formatting , it probably opens a can of worms.
Here is where it gets interesting you can run Windows 3.11 on a NeXT using soft pc but I don't know if you can then load a driver for Intel or if it will see a
NeXT optical drive at all but if it is dos formatted it might. My friends name is Sam at Computer Edge in Fort Collins.
Thanks for the information guys. 8)
With the Ubuthu Live CD option. If I boot with this rather than Windows will it still recognise my Canon drive?
Many thanks.
If it's just a SCSI device more than likely. That's the best thing about live CD's. If it doesn't work you don't have to swap hard drives or reload your old operating system, just press reset and eject the disc.
As I noted, it's not a standard SCSI disk. It uses a SCSI interface, but the actual device itself does not recognize SCSI commands. At one point I had the canon drivers and I spoke to the guy that developed them, as well as another guy that wrote a 3rd party tool, which they licensed technology from Canon for.
Both guys essentially stated that it looks like SCSI, smells like SCSI, but it isn't SCSI and no standard SCSI drivers will work.
I've had a number of these drives (Kashogi still has one of mine) and I have never been able to access the data from a Canofile without the custom software. If anyone is interested, I have a couple of boards from those drives... we might be able to dump the ROM from them.
Hey guys. All very interesting analysis.
I used a couple of Live CD products and attempted to take an image of the disk. However the Canon drive did not show up in the list to take an image from. I tried it with s disk in and without.
Any ideas about the best way to take an image?
Keep in mind the only PC I have that recognizes the Drive is a Windows 98 machine with a specific 1505 Maxicon SCSI adapter in. This is a 16 pin card that won't fit in a modern PCI slot. :?:
Quotethe only PC I have that recognizes the Drive is a Windows 98 machine with a specific 1505 Maxicon SCSI adapter in
How does it appear in Windows, as a letter drive ? Can you display folders and files ?
can you make a try with a version of dd for windows , maybe :
http://uranus.chrysocome.net/linux/rawwrite/dd-old.htm ?
Thanks for the dd for Windows. Sadly have all ready tried that. On installation it said 'the software is looking for a newer version of Windows' and that was with the oldest download version that I could find. Also tried installing Ubuthu Live CD old version again but that just ran painfully slow (1 hour) just to load then hung. As said Windows 98 and PC spec accordingly to see the drive.
It does show as a drive letter in windows and is recognized on boot screen as a SCSI device but previous posts suggest this could be a mirage. On trying to access files it says 'disk un formatted'. It is. I think it is an old file system not recognised by Windows.
Any more ideas?
I guess talking about WinImage would be a waste of time ...
matthew,
Were you able to get a version of dd for windows installed on the win98 machine? If windows is indeed able to see the drive but just can not interpret the filesystem, then you may still be able to dump the disk as raw data using dd. You would still have to reverse engineer the filesystem , but that could be done on a more up to date system. Still a very difficult task any way you look at it.
Nextchef (Like the name) I got dd for windows to work. That's the good news. Perhaps you can help...
To take a dd from my optical disk as I understand it I use the command 'dd --list' from there I get the name of the optical drive for example 'Volume{e3429891-0eb9-11da-b18f-000d60dc98cd}' I then use this as part of the dd command.
Problem: Windows 98 does not let you execute the 'dd --list' I therefore can't get the volume name to use.
Do you know a workaround?
OneNeXT I did get WinImage installed and it listed the drive as an option to 'read' but upon pressing go it just hung...
Well it looks like block devices are not supported on Win9x according to the dd page referenced, so no raw device imaging. Should have seen that before posting. :? You would need to be on an NT based OS like Win2000 for that to work. Do you have a Windows 2000 machine you can transfer the scsi card to and try it there, or another HD you can swap into the Win98 pc and install W2k on?
Hi Nextchef. Thanks for the advice.
I do have other PCs but I can't get the device to be recognised on anything except on the old low spec Windows 98 PC. Chicken and Egg situation...
Problem 1: This drive needs this specific SCSI card and guess what. Its a 16 bit ISA card. All my equipment post 98 just has PCI slots so I can't test if the drive works on them.
Problem 2: I don't think the Windows 98 PC has the spec to accept even Windows 2000.
Even with the low-level SCSI commands on Linux, I could never actually dump bucks from the drives.
Hello: You would probably be able to find an old pc with an isa slot for a reasonable price . What make and model of ISA SCSI card does it require?
I can probably integrate a system for you that would work so you can at least try it for a reasonable price . Or you may be able to just swap motherboards into your existing system boot it up and go.
I found a company in the UK. They operate globally called Content Capture Services.
http://www.contentcaptureservices.com/canofile-conversion-services/ They say they can do it and the cost is reasonable so I will give that a try. Thanks for all the advice. :D