David Gesswein mfm_emu MFM Hard Disk Reader/Emulator

This unit is intended to read MFM hard drives for archiving and to emulate one or two MFM hard drives to replace failing MFM drives. The image read from a real hard drive can be used for the emulation.

In theory the unit can emulate any MFM hard drive. In practice there are enough variations in how controllers use the drives that software changes have been needed to make it work with some systems. You will need to use a command line to operate the unit for reading disks and to configure it for emulating disks.

It should be able to read and save the raw transition data from most any hard drive using the ST506/ST412 interface. 

People are still running across formats it can't decode to sector data. For formats that are minor variations adding support doesn't take too long for the original author to do (We've had him add one for us and it was slightly over a week). For some controllers which did their own undocumented thing it can be significant effort to figure out the format. Handling physical to logical translation that some smart controllers did or any file system interpretation is outside the scope of the project.

This system is a fully completed board with a Beagle Bone Black with the latest release and supported OS already on it. 

(This is sourced from the original developer directly)