Re: D9060 Help Needed

On 11/30/09, Jim Brain <brain@jbrain.com> wrote:
> Ethan Dicks wrote:
>> Nice.
>>
> I mainly wanted one so I can see how CBM planned HDD storage (I have
> noticed an addition ',1' on the end of error strings, but maybe that's
> just BASIC 4.0's ?ds$ doing that.)  If there is anything of interest in
> the drive ROM/functionality that can be added to uIEC, I'd like to find out.

What about the "OPEN #15... INPUT#15..." route?  That will give you
*exactly* what the drive has to say and you wouldn't have to worry
about anything BASIC 4.0 might be doing.  I spent most of my time on
BASIC 2.0 machines, so I while I know the new commands, I still
"think" in the old paradigm.  Naturally, you can't just INPUT or GET
interactively, but I always used to stuff a little drive scoping
subroutine on stuff I was working on so I could jump to it from the
READY prompt.

>> Given that you don't know about the state of the Tandon drive, I'd
>> grab an ST225 or ST251...
>>
> Anyone have one I can borrow :-)  I don't have (never did) much in the
> way of vintage HDDs

Hmm... maybe someone closer to you can help with that.

>> Be sure to check the state of the J13/J14 jumper - it goes in D9060
>> mode for a 4-head drive and D9090 mode for a 6-head drive...
>
> I'll check that, but I would think the drive would give 00,OK,00,00 for
> commands like reading the drive channel.  I always get a 74.

I meant that you should check that if you swap hard drives.  It's
possible it's wrong in yours (it was wrong in one of mine), but I
think you get a "74" if you have any sort of bad low-level format or
HDA error.

> If I had to guess, I'd wager the SASI board is bad, as it was getting
> 12V but not 5V for a number of power cycles.  I have not looked at the
> schematic in depth, but I would assume they did not bring 12V to the
> board for nothing, and operating with only half a supply might not be
> good for it.

Given your issues, that's probably not a bad guess.  Obviously if
you've never formatted the disk, you wouldn't want to as a first-pass
item (in case there's something neat out there), which is why I
suggested a new drive to do format and write test.  My recollection is
that the drive is pretty much unhappy with most requests if the disk
surface isn't usable.  Of course, if your SASI board is toast, the
format should fail, hopefully right away.

Unfortunately, I think it's easy to fix the DOS board, but I'd be
scratching my head on where to start repairing the SASI board,
especially  with power-related/induced problems.

-ethan

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