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Pulled the HDD from my Dev. Box.

Posted: Mon Apr 26, 2010 7:02 pm
by game_player_s
Well guys (and gal), after a very patient amount of time in which I've kept an eye open for something to hook-up my Dev Box to my PC with I finally found the Holy Grail of SCSI adapters, a USB to SCSI 50-Pin adapter. And it was brand new factory sealed too!

Only problem, blasted thing was defective. No PC in my house would even detect the stupid adapter. This was the final straw.

A few mintues ago I removed the 60-Pin SCSI HDD from the Dev. Box and placed it into an anti-static bag. The objective is to haul it to work with me tomorrow and utilize SCSI equipment we have their to determine if there is any data still on this HDD. And if so, to copy it onto a USB thumb drive.

I have no idea if it's going to work out though. Have a good clue that the data should be in either a FAT16 or FAT32 partition seeing as the Dev Box had been designed for use as part of a Windows 98 SE setup. And the HDD is only a 4GB HDD, so there too those would be the most likely used formatting on the drive.

Say a prayer and Keep your fingers crossed. Even if the HDD shows up as blank we've got some insane recovery software at our disposal at work that can restore a drive to pre-erase state, though the data integrity is not always 100% this should at least shed light onto file names, whihc I hope will lead to the discovery of which developer had actually originally had possesion of my unit. The seller I bought it from was merely a middle-man selling it on behalf of someone else. When asked, he did give the name of the developer that he thought his consigner had mentioned, but a CD-R disc that was mixed in with some blank GD-ROM's included with the unit, which may be unrelated, implies an entirely different developer.

So I'm hoping to bring closure to this 4-year old puzzle tomorrow and at long last give myself some piece of mind.

Stay tuned tomorrow, same bat-time, same bat-channel

Re: Pulled the HDD from my Dev. Box.

Posted: Mon Apr 26, 2010 10:12 pm
by Hobofreak
Cool I hope it works out.

Re: Pulled the HDD from my Dev. Box.

Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 9:17 pm
by game_player_s
HDD Was far from empty. Retrived almost two gigabytes of data from the drive. Here's a screen grab of the files retrieved:

Image

It should be noted at this time that this confirms that the CD-R that was mixed in with the blank GD-ROM's that came with the unit wasn't there by chance. The CD-R disc contained what seemed to be a complete copy of System Shock 2 save I could never find an install file. I don't know where that disc is currently, but it appears as if it may have very well been a copy of the same files within the "SystemShock2" folder from the dev kit. Thus the mystery of the origins of this Dev. Kit are now laid to rest.

This Developer's Kit was once the possesion of Eidos.

Questions welcomed.

Re: Pulled the HDD from my Dev. Box.

Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 9:30 pm
by Anthony817
System Shock 2 beta?

Re: Pulled the HDD from my Dev. Box.

Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 10:14 pm
by game_player_s
Yep.

Re: Pulled the HDD from my Dev. Box.

Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2010 1:02 am
by dirtydav
Awesome! make a CDI ! :D


What else can you do with it now? is it useless?

Re: Pulled the HDD from my Dev. Box.

Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2010 3:04 am
by mazonemayu
great; yet another lost dc game found. can't wait :D

Re: Pulled the HDD from my Dev. Box.

Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2010 7:40 am
by K_I_R_E_E_K
Great work, that effort took you 4 years? dam.

:D

Re: Pulled the HDD from my Dev. Box.

Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2010 9:05 am
by game_player_s
K_I_R_E_E_K wrote:Great work, that effort took you 4 years? dam.

:D

I'm a very patient procrastonator. :P

I don't know that it's possible to make a bootable out of Thief 2 unfortunately as the game files are a grand total of 927MB. System Shock 2 on the other hand is only a little over 600MB, so if someone wants to advise me on how to make a bootable out of it that would be great.

Re: Pulled the HDD from my Dev. Box.

Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2010 9:17 am
by Gary_b
game_player_s wrote:
K_I_R_E_E_K wrote:Great work, that effort took you 4 years? dam.

:D

I'm a very patient procrastonator. :P

I don't know that it's possible to make a bootable out of Thief 2 unfortunately as the game files are a grand total of 927MB. System Shock 2 on the other hand is only a little over 600MB, so if someone wants to advise me on how to make a bootable out of it that would be great.
it would be cool if you could rar it and upload all of the files to megauploads or something? i personally wouldnt know how to make it into a bootable disc but it would be cool to look at them.