I had this problem recently: I had an old Atari SCSI hard drive and wanted to copy all the files from it to a PC. But simply using the Atari machine itself to traverse the filesystem, and then (I guess) somehow sending the stuff over the serial interface, would have been way too slow. Also I was not sure how much life the drive had left in it, it had sat in a cold locker for many years without being powered up. So this is what to do instead...
By the way, if you're like me and you're running Windows on a daily basis, you can use Gemulator (from http://www.gemulator.com) to temporarily run any old Atari programs that are required to read or manipulate your old Atari files. But when I tried to run Gemulator on my ICD-formatted Atari hard disk image, it appears it does not recognize or read the "big" ICD partitions — that's why I had to run thru all the hoops below!
dd if=/dev/sdaXXX of=atari.dskwhere you of course replace /dev/sdaXXX with the appropriate device (/dev/sda0, /dev/sda4 or whatever).
You should probably verify that you have a drive image that's the size of the drive. Now you can power down the drive again forever, without any more worries about head crashes, stiction, whatever.
You can of course use a different image file name than 'atari.dsk', the perl script below assumes that name though.
The good news is that the actual partitions are very similar to DOS partitions. So once you have the start sector numbers you can use 'mtools' under Linux to access them transparently, even 'BGM' partitions, using the MTOOLS_SKIP_CHECK option. (It might even be possible to mount them as linux filesystems, with read-write access and whatnot, using one of the /dev/loop devices, but I didn't go that far in my experimentations. If you're curious see man losetup and man mount..)
Once I had figured all of the above out*, it was a simple procedure of writing a small perl script to extract the offsets from the root sector (sector 0). The script in question (ataripart.pl) is here (updated 2005/04 — it appears some of the flags and behavior for mtools have changed. The old perl script is here.
The script writes the correct .mtoolsrc . This overrides the "standard" settings of the mtools utilites, so any mtools commands you execute from within that directory will refer to the Atari HD image, ie, mdir c: will list the contents of the Atari boot drive. The perl script also writes a file (called 'source-me') with the correct mtools commands to transfer all the files from the various partitions to the separate directories 'atari/c', 'atari/d', etc.
mdir c:, mdir d:etc for all the Atari partitions you remember having) you can go ahead and transfer the files. You can either do it manually by issuing commands such as
mcopy -snm "c:/*" atari/c(The option flags '-snm' mean: recurse thru all subdirs, preserve original timestamps, replace files without asking) You can also automatically do this to all the drives the perl script found, by typing
source source-meOne caveat: the Atari operating system was not picky at all when it came to file names. Filenames containing "?" or "/" were no problem, nor "forbidden" words under DOS such as AUX or CON. So if you are copying the files to a normal FAT/FAT32 partition, you may get errors when attempting to create some of them..