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Help with Xf551


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I always wanted to get xf551; recently found one in nice condition, but it doesnt work

 

Upon power up, the head moves slightly and retracts back.

When I push the head with my fingers, it moves back to track 0 when powering up.

 

The linked video that I recorded can probably explain better than I can

 

Any ideas what could be wrong?

 

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that's what is suppose to happen.... it should home to zero on power up... if the sensor did not work it would hit the stop a couple times and there would be no space between the stop. so you should look as drive switches in the back hole of case and two of them side by side...

make sure drive heads are clean and dry.

 

pick a known good disk to boot.... preferably single sided single density so get started. If that fails, use another SIO cord in the other SIO jack on the back of the drive...

 

You may end up touching up the solder to the SIO jack, the connections are weak on the XF 551's

Edited by _The Doctor__
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As suggested, make sure you re-flow the solder points on the SIO connectors. I found it best to add some new solder to each point. It is a common problem with these drives, and it only takes a few minutes to take care of. Hope it works out!

 

I recently restored an XF551 that would not format to 360K by replacing the Mitsumi mechanism with a Teac FD-55BR. The face was a perfect match and the drive is very quiet.

 

post-62925-0-71265300-1554503243_thumb.jpg

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Thanks for all the replies - it turns out my drive does not spin up at all. The head moves, but the drive mech appears dead.

 

As suggested, make sure you re-flow the solder points on the SIO connectors. I found it best to add some new solder to each point. It is a common problem with these drives, and it only takes a few minutes to take care of. Hope it works out!

 

I recently restored an XF551 that would not format to 360K by replacing the Mitsumi mechanism with a Teac FD-55BR. The face was a perfect match and the drive is very quiet.

 

attachicon.gifIMG_0265 (1).jpg

That looks so cool.

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The mech may have been replaced but not set to be

DS0 as the XF-551 requires it to be in order to answer

to the FDC. This is NOT the drive select switches on

the back of the XF-551 case, this is a jumper setting

on the drive mech itself. Can you report the model

of your drive mech? I can then maybe find where your

drive jumpers should be at and what that 'switch'

setting should be.

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As suggested, make sure you re-flow the solder points on the SIO connectors. I found it best to add some new solder to each point. It is a common problem with these drives, and it only takes a few minutes to take care of. Hope it works out!

 

I recently restored an XF551 that would not format to 360K by replacing the Mitsumi mechanism with a Teac FD-55BR. The face was a perfect match and the drive is very quiet.

 

IMG_0265 (1).jpg

Did you run into any problems installing the Teac drive. Were the cables long enough? About other problems to be aware of? Thanks for this idea.

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The floppy data cable was just barely long enough to reach. I was very glad I did not have to re-do that. If you fold the cable carefully it should reach. The floppy data connector does collide with the heat sink because the Teac is a bit longer than the original mechanism. I used some airplane snips to remove a rectangular portion of the heat sink. The aluminum is fairly soft. I just made two cuts and then bent the part I wanted to remove until it broke loose. This avoided having to remove the heat sync to dremel or saw out the section. The whole process only took about 15 minutes. I set the drive jumper to 0, and it fired right up and worked exactly as it should. It is more quiet than the original drive, but I don't have a reference for what a good working original mechanism sounds like. I bought another XF551 that should arrive today, so I'll see what kind of adventures I get into with that one. I hope you work it out. This link with Google translate was helpful:

 

http://blog.3b2.sk/igi/post/Atari-XF551-oprava-vymena-FD-Mitsumi-za-TEAC-FD-55BR-Repair-Atari-XF511-replacing-FD-MITSUMI-TEAC-FD-55BR.aspx

 

but it seems it was much easier for me. Hope you get it worked out!

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I received my 2nd XF551 today, and it has exactly the same problem as the first one that I bought. It will not format to 360K, but seems to work fine for any format that a 1050 can do. This makes me wonder if it is something I am doing wrong, but it is more likely that I just have bad luck, since the Teac mechanism fixed the problem in the 1st one. It is interesting that someone put screws on the SIO connectors of this drive to keep them from moving around and breaking the solder joints.

 

Anyway, more related to this topic, the 2nd drive has different power and data cables, and I don't think this data cable would be long enough for the Teac drive, so you may want to watch out for that.

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What dos are you using?

density switching on the XF can be daunting if you don't know how it does the magic...

If the drive formats at 360k and you write dos files to it and in the case of spartados...you type the command boot x32d.dos etc....

You may find on a cold start of the drive the Atari will say boot error... just press reset and it should then boot... I uploaded the XF sparta tools on AA long ago.... very odd to have multiple drives with the same issue...

Edited by _The Doctor__
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I received my 2nd XF551 today, and it has exactly the same problem as the first one that I bought. It will not format to 360K, but seems to work fine for any format that a 1050 can do. This makes me wonder if it is something I am doing wrong, but it is more likely that I just have bad luck, since the Teac mechanism fixed the problem in the 1st one. It is interesting that someone put screws on the SIO connectors of this drive to keep them from moving around and breaking the solder joints.

 

Anyway, more related to this topic, the 2nd drive has different power and data cables, and I don't think this data cable would be long enough for the Teac drive, so you may want to watch out for that.

I looked around ebay, and these 5.25 360K drives are expensive. So I decided to play around with Gotek drive in a XF551 enclosure.

 

I've read that the latest FlashFloppy firmware supports ATR images, so I will give that a try, once my Gotek arrives from China.

The floppy cable will have to be replaced. I don't know yet what's simpler - crimp a new 3.5 inch floppy cable to the existing connector on the XF551 board, or solder in a new 34 pin header to this board.

 

If it works, I will probably buy a 3.5 to 5.25 faceplate, so the 3.5 inch Gotek fits nicely within the XF551 enclosure.

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Would a card edge adapter to the 3.5 floppy connector work?

 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Card-Edge-to-IDC-Connector-Adapter-5-25-to-3-5-Floppy-Cable-HxC-Gotek-34-pin/163481202090?hash=item26103d2daa:g:cDMAAOSwkAxcOB4U&frcectupt=true

 

I thought about something like a Gotek, but I decided that the only reason I really wanted an XF551 was for the nostalgia, and to have a drive that matched my 130XE. I found a Teac FD-55BV drive that I am going to try. I'm not sure what the difference is between FD-55BR and FD-55BV. I read something about the BR being the "low power" version. I hope the FD-55BV won't draw too much power for the power supply. The V may also just relate to color or other features. From what I can tell it is still a 360K DS/DD drive. From the picture it looks exactly the same. I'll see when it gets here.

 

I'm pretty sure I'll have to replace or extend the floppy data cable on this particular drive. I'll report back when it arrives and I have tried it out.

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I installed the Gotek in the XF551 enclosure. It works, but it is about 50% slower than SIO2SD. This is using FlashFloppy v 2.04 (ATR support is in experimental stages).

Video of it loading Donkey Kong is linked below (the data-load bits are slow, if you turn up the volume you'll see what I mean).

 

Also, I wonder if it's possible to power this Gotek and the XF551 board from the SIO bus, skipping the power supply?

 

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That's a neat proof of concept to see!

 

Sounds like the gotek is either emulating a sector interleave of 1, or an RPM of 300 instead of 288 causing it to always 'miss' the next sector, and having to wait a full virtual 'revolution' of the disk for the next sector.

 

Could be interesting to run an RPM test utility.

 

Does the gotek document or allow configurability of the emulated sector interleave?

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That's a neat proof of concept to see!

 

Sounds like the gotek is either emulating a sector interleave of 1, or an RPM of 300 instead of 288 causing it to always 'miss' the next sector, and having to wait a full virtual 'revolution' of the disk for the next sector.

 

Could be interesting to run an RPM test utility.

 

Does the gotek document or allow configurability of the emulated sector interleave?

 

 

Gotek allows different configuration options via FF.cfg file, but there are no examples on how to configure it for 8bit Ataris.

I posted the same question on https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/issues/223

Hopefully will get somewhere.

 

I wanted to get a 5.25 drive going, but didn't want to spend over $60 on a new drive mech, not knowing if the XF551 board is working.. At least now I know that the board is fine and my drive drive is dead (not the other way around).

 

However, if this gotek works with XF551 board, my next step is to get a OLED screen and a 3.5-5.25 bracket for the Gotek, so it fits nicely in the XF551 enclosure.

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There's actually some lines in the IMG.CFG file that sound likely, but you are loading ATR files, not IMG, so not sure if it applies?

 

# Optional: Sector interleave. Default is 1:1 (no interleave).
# interleave = 1

Try "interleave = 9" for standard speed 1x SIO.

 

The XF551 actually normally runs at 300RPM, so my previous 288RPM comment is not a factor.

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