My first attempt was to connect the ISA card to a newer system. I dropped it into an AMD K6-2 machine, but it wouldn't get past POST. I have three other ISA machines to try.

The controller is a Western Digital 1002a-27x, attached to a Seagate RLL drive. I found very minimal data about the card online, in hopes of configuring it to work in the newer motherboards. My fear is that the controller (from an XT) is incompatible with AT/ATX ISA slots and I'll somehow damage it or the hard drive by fiddling with it. But I've got the data now, so I'm less worried.

ISA (and PCI) controller cards have always worked for me. But with this, it seems that I have to convince the BIOS to accept it. The XT has no CMOS, so I think the system resources for the controller are hardcoded somewhere. I think that's the problem; this XT board isn't used to AT's flexibility.

I'll look online for more info re: XT controllers in newer motherboards. I'll also try DOS 6.22 undelete (via 360k 5 1/4" floppy boot disk). I'll even try Ghost sector-by-sector image over parallel data transfer cable... if I can fit an old version of Ghost on a 360k floppy. I doubt the machine will recognize a high density floppy drive.

But even with a drive image, hunting through fragmented data with a hex editor will be terribly hard. Wish I could search only the "blank" space for file fragments. It's only 40 meg, so finding "-1WPC" (the file header) can't be too hard.