data-recoverymac
My father bought an Apple Macintosh II CX in 1990 and it survived until 2010, when the main harddrive broke down and despite trying multiple times, booting from floppy disks failed for an unknown reason.
The main concern is the external 800 MB SCSI harddrive that is intact and hosts files that need recovery.
What kind of hardware and software (PC/MAC/Linux, anything goes) would be required to extract the data from the external hard drive? If there are several ways, what's the cheapest one?
You could use ddrescue to try to clone the raw volume (there are some notes on running it under OS X on tinyapps.org). It basically tries to read over & over, getting as much as possible from the disk.
This isn't ideal for your situation, since it 1) needs enough free disk space (either a volume or a disk image) to hold the entire drive, including free space (i.e. if it was a 200GB drive with 10GB of files, you need 200GB to hold the clone); and 2) it doesn't tell you which files it couldn't read (you can look at the log and see what blocks it hasn't been able to read, but figuring out what files those blocks are part of is not trivial).
The good news about is that, thanks to its log file, if it missed something you need (and you haven't modified the target volume at all -- mounting readonly is recommended), you can just run it again and it'll pick up where it left off, and keep hammering on the difficult blocks until they give up their data.
Okay, so I think I've solved the problem and thought I'd post this up just in case anyone runs into similar issues...
I've downloaded a program Data Rescue 3, and I'm scanning the drive for deleted files. The program seems easy to use although I found that if you want to scan your internal drive (as in my case), you'll need to have another external drive plugged in as the software won't let you restore to the same drive you're recovering from.
When you run the software, select your internal drive to scan off then select the deleted files scan. When prompted, select your external drive to work off.
I'll post my results, success or failure, in the comments soon.
Screenshot of results:
Best Answer
Wait and buy a used Classic mac with a SCSI port that works. Also Ultra SCSI cards for PC's go for $25 to $50 on the internet, so you could go that way with a cheap PC or borrow one.
Any computer can image the drive into an ISO CD image so you can get it to a Mac to mount the filesystem and read things.