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Getting a 3.5" drive connected to 800XL . . .


MacRorie

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Hello all,

 

I have been slowly trying to get a 3.5" drive connected to my 800XL.

 

As a caveat: I have access to many many other ways to put data on the 8bit. I realize these are probably more expedient and efficient, but I like to try old stuff. I'm weird that way. So, if you can stomach that level of oddity, I would WELCOME your help ;-)

 

Here's what I have:

XF551 with a Bob Wooley 80 track ROM. Probably works, purchased off of ePay. The 551 worked as stock before I pulled the old rom and put in the new one. Did not have to socket it as a socket was already there.

 

Mistumi 3.5" 1.44MB drive pulled from a Windows 95(!) machine. Works. Formatted a 720k floppy just fine (I used it to create a boot disk to load the drivers for the Portfolio Card drive, so I could connect a iomega ZIP100 drive to the Portfolio . . worked like a charm! but that is another story for another forum)

 

A collection of 34pin card edge to IDC adaptors. [see pic]

 

I can get it all connected, but I cannot get SDX to format. It sees the drive without a problem. Access light comes on when being accessed, but no joy. I know something is not right because SDX polls the drive and polls the drive on boot until it errors out and then drops to the C drive. (I have also tried booting without the drive on and then trying things, no joy.)

 

So, I know SOMEONE here has some magic in their hat that will say, "Oh, hey, you just need to . . . " and there will be joy in Fujidom.

 

I have also reduced the pics included as much as possible. If they are too big for folks, I do apologize.

 

Thanks for your troubles.

-M

 

 

 

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post-16779-0-65276400-1438159975_thumb.jpg

post-16779-0-90903300-1438159976_thumb.jpg

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Hi MacRorie, don't forget all XF-551 drives are set as drive 0 and NOT the standard PC drive 1 (2nd drive). By default that drive is jumpered as the second drive which will not work setting in an XF-551. The activity light may be coming on due to MOTOR ON signal but the drive still won't answer until it's jumpered to be drive 0. Google d359t5 for jumper layout, best of luck there.

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A really nice project! I've wanted something like this for a while. If you get it sorted I hope you will post full details of your re/build?

 

The big hurdle is the price of XF551's. Other than good luck on eBay you are looking at ~£175-200+P&P for a guaranteed working but refurbished unit from Best Electronics. That's a lot.

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Just re-read my post and I might have left the wrong impression without even realizing it - sorry.

 

Of course that drive will work in the XF-551 - if you jumper it to be drive 0 first. All you need to do is move the jumper from 1 to 0 position. But I don't know exactly where that jumper is. It's there somewhere, even if the jumper jack has been left off and it's now just a solder blob on the circuit board as some have done since they standardized to the drive one settings in modern times - so just move the solder blob in that case.

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Hello 1050

 

Why not swap some wires on the flat cable? Should be a lot easier than getting to the solder blob on some drive mechs.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

ALong those thought lines, one of the adaptors in the pic allows for you to change the DS number. That does not fix it. So, either there is another problem involved OR sapping the DS# on the cable/adaptor does not work. Not sure. I am thinking there is another problem. The adaptor with all of the options on it may be the source of solutions. However, I am not sure what those options mean.

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Hi Mathy,

 

I'm not sure that would work out though, I've never attempted such a thing. Somehow I'm tending to think it's best if we just do it the way we KNOW works. Play around with that sort of thing later after the drive is known to work and we can easily return it to working condition? If this were the PC then of course this would work - that's exactly how they do it there too. The XF-551 isn't a PC and it does some strange things with MOTOR ON signal as well as drive select signals, I don't feel comfortable enough with that system to say one way or another - so I won't advise that it works. If I had a system up and running and it would only take a half hour of fiddling around to find out - I would have done that already. But I don't and can't, so all I can do about it is talk.

 

I've got the same feeling when I look at those adapters too. They should work aces, but ONLY if they are used on the exact drive they were meant for - at least two of them call out the drive model number they work on. If you had that drive, then fine. Otherwise I wouldn't trust it. One reason I just thought of as why they wouldn't work is because you first have to remove all the jumpers from the drive in order for the jumpers on the adapter can work - so here you are inside it moving solder blob #1 anyway. We know for a fact it is set for #1 since it worked on the PC.

 

When they made these drives with the removed jumper jacks they didn't remold the cover, move the board or hide the jumper jack in any way. You can still get to it thru the same access hole you always could have before, the only thing missing is the brass pins that used to hold the jumpers. It can be found and solder blobs moved quite easy I would think.

 

Don't reinvent the wheel here guys, locate that jumper block, find the solder blob and move it to zero position.

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The way Atari handled drive select on the XFF551 was to connect MOTOR to DS0 via a trace, this way the drive is selected whenever the MOTOR signal becomes active.

 

DS1 could be connected to MOTOR on the circuit board as well, having 2 selects active shouldn't cause an issue with a single mechanism.

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At some point in time, you might consider getting or burning a "Hyper-XF" rom and try that, also. But if you do, there are two different roms -- one for 5-1/4" and a different one for 3.5". Why try Hyper-XF? It was quite a bit later and has some additional features that you might like. If you Google Hyper-XF (or search here at AA), you can read all about it. My first adventure with the '551 was also Bob's 3.5 upgrade.

 

-Larry

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Thanks BillC, all I could remember was that MOTOR signal was involved somehow and it wasn't standard to my way of thinking.

 

So I look at the XF-551 schematic and I can see they just jumper MOTOR line (cable 16) to DS0 (cable 10).

 

What we need to do then is jumper cable 10 to cable 12 and it should work for a drive #1 jumpered drive. So a solder blob on those two pins on the underside of the XF-551 at the 34 pin cable would do the trick.

 

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Bottom row is even pins, starting with left at silk screened 2 visable, you can see the jumper trace from pin 10 to pin 16. Join pin 10 and the one to the right of it pin 12. And hope you don't need to disconnect trace to pin 10? Worth a try.

 

Curved board effect is from plastic loupe doing fish-eye things to my phone camera, only way to stay in focus up so tight.

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I would put the XF551 ROM back in and make sure that the XF551 works with the stock 5.25 drive. Then replace the 5.25 with your 3.5 using the TEAC adaptor. That jumper on the adaptor is for Drive Ready, I believe - try it in both positions. You probably can't mount the 3.5 and plug in the 34-pin connector at the same time, so just lay the drive on a piece of cardboard. At this point, you have to resolve your D0: D1: issues so the XF551 can talk to the drive. If I remember, the drive motor will spin but you get no drive select if the address is wrong. Once you can 'talk' to the drive, put in the new ROM and see how it goes.

 

I wouldn't try soldering anything on the XF551 board. The PCB is very fragile...

 

Bob

 

 

 

Hello all,

 

I have been slowly trying to get a 3.5" drive connected to my 800XL.

 

As a caveat: I have access to many many other ways to put data on the 8bit. I realize these are probably more expedient and efficient, but I like to try old stuff. I'm weird that way. So, if you can stomach that level of oddity, I would WELCOME your help ;-)

 

Here's what I have:

XF551 with a Bob Wooley 80 track ROM. Probably works, purchased off of ePay. The 551 worked as stock before I pulled the old rom and put in the new one. Did not have to socket it as a socket was already there.

 

Mistumi 3.5" 1.44MB drive pulled from a Windows 95(!) machine. Works. Formatted a 720k floppy just fine (I used it to create a boot disk to load the drivers for the Portfolio Card drive, so I could connect a iomega ZIP100 drive to the Portfolio . . worked like a charm! but that is another story for another forum)

 

A collection of 34pin card edge to IDC adaptors. [see pic]

 

I can get it all connected, but I cannot get SDX to format. It sees the drive without a problem. Access light comes on when being accessed, but no joy. I know something is not right because SDX polls the drive and polls the drive on boot until it errors out and then drops to the C drive. (I have also tried booting without the drive on and then trying things, no joy.)

 

So, I know SOMEONE here has some magic in their hat that will say, "Oh, hey, you just need to . . . " and there will be joy in Fujidom.

 

I have also reduced the pics included as much as possible. If they are too big for folks, I do apologize.

 

Thanks for your troubles.

-M

 

 

 

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So, I thought I had already tested the XF551 prior to disassembling it for this project, but I did a double-check just so I could say that I had definitely tested it. Wellllllll, it works, reads and writes, but it will only format to single density on double-sided. I get an error any time I try to do double density, double sided 40 tracks with SDX 4.47 or 4.46. Dos XE works fine at that, but whatever. SOOOO, I guess I need a new XF to do this project? #$%^&*()

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I started getting DS/DD and high speed sector skew formatting errors twenty years ago and found that oiling the spindle and head arms fixed it. Never had a lick of bother with it since.

 

hmmm, this could be a good fix. I *think* I know what you are talking about, but if you had pictures handy I could eliminate my ignorance (yes, that was a rather fancy way of saying "Umm, could you make it simpler for me? ;-) )

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DOS XE works fine? You mean it formats at DD/DS - 360K?

 

The XF551 is a little tricky, as I remember. Getting it to format a good 360K requires both the drive and DOS to be on the same page. If you can format 360K on DOS XE, then use that formatted disk as media to format with SDX.

 

Bob

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Exnay on new XF-551 needed in my opinion. You already have evidence that it does work via very lucky encounter with DOS XE, some DOS were gifted in this particular area and others like MyDOS need a cheat to get going DSDD on the stock XF-551. Bob's OS code helps a bunch there, but MyDOS remains wounded in this particular arena as do other DOSes. I wouldn't just up and quit at the first little hurdle like that.

 

But I am thinking you might also be suffering from pin number 3 disease? To fix it you have to cut the third 34 pin cable wire. This is just one ground wire out of 16 others on very old drives and it's not critical there at all anyway, but newish 3.5 may still have a pin there and it's used to relay 5 volt only drive status to OS/2 type computers (obsolete now). Only when you don't have a pin three on the drive are you safe from the third pin disease as the latest drives have no pin there anymore and the latest cables use this space as a 'no hole' solid plastic key to prevent plugging the cable connector in upside down/backwards. Very surprised this third pin issue hasn't become very well known about before this too. It will cause a 'not ready' to be sent to the computer if it is grounded on 3.5 drives with a third pin of some two or more decades of manufacture - a darn good chance yours might be one of them. How DOS XE gets around it, I wouldn't know for sure, but it may be that it just acknowledges the 'not ready' status and proceeds anyway where other DOS say 'well then, no soup for you'. Cut that 3rd cable wire (or twist the pin off deep in the drive connector socket like I did) and the XF-551 is forever immune to the 3rd pin disease. This is a harmless modification, it's also mandatory to safeguard against this issue when you have a drive that still has pin number three.

 

Bob's advice to use the DOS XE DSDD formatted disk to re-format with SDX indicates years of cleverness at work there - very sound advice and you have the best chance of success following it. Sometimes helps to pull a directory read on such a target disk just before the format attempt too. Stock XF-551 was well known to have DD switching problems, you may need to attempt several directory pulls until you have success there as well before it FINALLY knows this is a DD disk in the first place. Just closing the door doesn't get it done as will happen on the 1050, this system nor the OS is aware of the door just to start with.

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