🚀 go-pugleaf

Can anyone help me to get some information of an old half-corrupt 20MB
miniscribe hard disk? (611 cylinders, 4 sides, 17 sectors of 512 bytes each
per side).

I have been using Norton Utilities Advanced Edition to read Absolute
sectors giving the absolute side (0-3), cylinder(0-610) and sector (1-17)
address and pulling files off sector by sector. I have the FAT and most
of the directory structure.

Using NU is very laborious, what I need is information on how to use a get
DOS call to readsuch absolute sectors myself. I am a reasonably competent
programmer (I know how partitions, boot sectors, FATs, directory structures
work). I will be doing the work in Turbo Pascal version 3, a program to read a
512 byte sector given absolute side, cylinder, and sector would be very nice. I
know how to do a DOS call from Turbo Pascal as the manual documents how
to read the timer. WHat I don't know is what is the DOS call to read an
absolute sector and what parameters does it take.

Please answer by email. Thanks in advance for any help.

-Tony Ryan, Hon. Sec., Astronomy Ireland, P.O.Box 2888, Dublin 1.
newslines (48p/36p per min):    0891-88-1950 UK    1550-111-442 Eire