HI, Rick,
Go with your first inclination.  Get an old 286 and put in at least one
floppy drigve into which you'll put a bootable disk of somebody's DOS 5.0 or
later with the Intersvr.exe program on it.  Put in as many of those MFM
drives at one time as the PC and your complement of controllers can take.
Connect it to a "laplink" type parallel cable to a faster, newer machine
with a big drive, and run the intersvr.exe program on the 286 or XT machine.
 The old MFM drives become "drives" for the faster machine and you can use
your favorite utilities to transfer what data you want to the big disk.
Swap out disks until you're done and then use the MFM drives' cases as cases
for geeky electric clocks, geeky wind chimes, or give them to some
inquisitive boy who is into building old computers and getting things to
work.  Actually, if you have a good 286 machine and a 16-bit MFM controller,
save the best largest capacity drives from that MFM collection for use in an
old backup, DOS-only machine.  The biggest MFM drive I ever had was an
85MB-capacity drive formatted, but I heard of a 400MB MFM drive.

If you send those MFM drives to a company that does Data Recovery, if they
even have MFM controllers, they wll charge you several dollars per megabyte
of data to "recover" what's on those disks.  Unless you're in a line of work
where your time is really valuable and the time to do the job yourself would
deny you the opportunity to make a couple hundred or a couple thousand
dollars an hour, then Don't let a data recovery professional do the job.
Paying the prices they charge per Megabyte of "recovered" data, is sort of
like killing mosquitoes with a shotgun.  If the MFM disks have bad boot
sectors and you can't get them read by your old machine, then you might be
able to find some budding young nerd who might transfer the data for you in
exchange for letting him keep the drives to play with.
At any rate, have fun doing it!
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Brent Reynolds, Atlanta, GA  USA

3 dreaded words: " hard disk failure."

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