I got the RLL HDD controller and drive to boot in my Pentium 166, but I had to disable all of its onboard IDE, and the floppy drive didn't work correctly (because it was controlled by the RLL controller?). This shows that it is possible.

Now, in order to run Windows-based recovery tools, I need to run both the RLL controller and another drive with an operating system at the same time. RLL + onboard IDE? RLL + bootable CD OS???


I also got the XT to boot to a DOS 6.22 5 1/2" 360k floppy disk that I made. I ran UNDELETE and found one recoverable file - a temp file containing the document at the time of the corruption. I recovered it, got it on a real machine, and examined it in hex to find it was also corrupt like the other document I recovered... but it seems to be an older version of the document.


It's back to running Windows recovery tools on the RLL drive if I can get it to boot with a Windows OS somehow...