Adventures in PC-98, Part 01...
Hopefully you are all familiar with vintage computing and retro gaming enthusiast, YouTuber and un-official face of Superdry UK CTRL-ALT-REES (if not why not? Go check him out!), who recently acquired and restored a couple of NEC PC-9821's from Japan.
I wont go into background here on the PC-98 platform or his experience with his particular machines, if you want to know more I suggest you go watch those videos [1] [2] – however during his journey it became apparent that the hard drive on his particular machine was in far from optimum condition and (spoiler) “died” part way through the process of restoring the machine. That particular episode ended with a passing comment about the possibility of recovering the install from that particular drive...
In my 9-5, it is not unusual for machines to come past my desk in need of various recovery and remediation of unique or irreplaceable data... Since we deal with sites that could have anything from hardware built yesterday to proprietary platforms that are older than myself, over the years we have built up quite a “toolkit” in order to handle this as much as possible in-house.
We can typically handle anything short of needing a “cleanroom” or specialist dis-assembly, and anyone who has experienced the need for this level of recovery work will know that this typically starts at 4 figures...so you'll understand our desire as a company to attempt as much as possible ourselves!
Naturally having this kit at my disposal, wanting to help out ol' poor Rees, and no small amount of personal curiosity in testing my kit on a platform iv never come across before...for some reason a few weeks later Rees sent me the drive to have a crack at...the fool!
Now when I mention this “toolkit” you may have images of thousand pound specialist and bespoke hardware designed for just this purpose... beware you may be disappointed in a moment...
Our most recent iteration of the “toolkit” is just a run of the mill 4th Gen Intel based Dell Precision workstation, in fact this particular machine was rescued from our Finance department and a life of spreadsheets following the normal 5yr refresh we carry out on our desktops and laptop fleet! This seems anti-climatic but this is not without good reason on deeper inspection...
- This machine fits nicely between the end of legacy BIOS support and mainstream adoption of UEFI by default, with FULL working Option Rom support in both (not a broken CSM implementation or half baked UEFI shell, depending on if you go newer or older)... We also have a nice selection of PCIe slots and even a native PCI slot by default.
- This of course means we have excellent support for pretty much any controller or interface card from the late 90's to present day... IDE, SCSI, SAS, SATA, even NVMe all work perfectly on this machine. So we can pretty much support any drive or media short of some really esoteric stuff. Of course being a natural tech hoarder means we have a reasonable collection of interface cards and even drives for things like Tape, ZIP, JAZ, MO, etc... (iv even dumped a bunch of Travan tapes on this particular machine for example recently!)
- Dell built literally millions of these machines, which means if it goes bang for any reason, within 24hrs I can get a replacement used board for typically under £20, from one of many IT Recyclers and E-Waste specialists. That said they have a reputation for being bullet proof machines, and are just prior to when Dell started really cutting costs and quality on their desktop and laptop range...
Of course hardware is only part of the solution, a good selection of software tools is essential...not to mention no small amount of “luck” at times.
So like any good play the stage is now set, the characters are introduced, and in the next installment lets hook up this drive and see what we are dealing with and if we can get any life out of it...