David Lovett Finds Source Code Stash After Bringing a 1980s Hard Drive Back From the Dead — Briefly

Vintage computing enthusiast David Lovett has been working on restoring a Centurion MicroPlus minicomputer, including gaining access to data stored on its 8" hard drive — and, after a considerable amount of work, has been able to report at least partial success.

"This is a CDC [Control Data Corporation] Finch [Model 9410] drive," Lovett explains of the storage device he's attempting to restore. "This only weighs maybe 20 or 30 pounds as opposed to 130 pounds [for older Hawk drives]. I believe this one is a 32MB [capacity] option because it has three platters inside. There is a second Finch over here that only has two platters inside, so I think this is a 24MB option. The goal is to get both of these Finches going, however they're both broken — and they're both broken in different ways, which is good [as] it means we can cross-reference across each other."

The Centurion MicroPlus was a hefty minicomputer designed as a more affordable alternative to the Digital PDP-11 and Data General Nova, though while it also billed itself as more compact it hails from a time when "compact" meant "only takes up a single cabinet." The drives Lovett is working on belong to Vintage Geek in Knoxville Tennessee, along with the Centurion MicroPlus from which they came — but early efforts to restore the device and its drives to working order have proven challenging.

Initial attempts to replace a possibly bad line driver weren't enough, though the replacement of a regulator which appeared to have failed proved more successful in allowing one of the two drives to pass a simple seek test. A more detailed test, loaded from an older Hawk drive, revealed that while the repaired drive could seek it couldn't read — a fault which turned out to be traced to the disk controller itself, and as easy to remedy as swapping the drive across to one of the controller's other ports.

"Okay, there's so much stuff on here," Lovett says of the disk's contents, once it was successfully seen by the operating system. "They stacked this thing full of data. It's really mostly boring files, there's nothing really exciting on there. There are a ton of files in here that start with the letter O, and I think that corresponds to it being part of the oil and gas [software] package. But there was a another one called 'zol' and it's just pure ASCII files that all start with the letter Z."

These, Lovett believes, are source code for an unknown piece of software — but during attempts to recover the files, the disk died once again. "It had a total uptime of about 30 minutes before it kicked the bucket," Lovett says. "Now, I don't think that the heads have crashed, I am, like, 95 per cent certain that the platters are still good, the heads are still good, and we still have good data on there, because if I get this scope out I still get a clean index signal and a clean bite clock coming out of the data cable here on the bottom."

Lovett hasn't yet given up, though, and promises that the next entry in the ongoing restoration series on his YouTube channel, Usagi Electric, will focus on getting the drive up and running again and finally finishing the job of dumping the source code.