exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

atari030 wrote: ↑Thu Jun 09, 2022 1:48 pm 59602932[1].jpg

Ok, so the remaining parts for the PSU repair arrived today, and the machine is reassembled with a new IC49 (74HCT245 buffer) and (Hopefully) the IDE socket repaired.

IC169 is also replaced, though I doubt it'll really make much difference to anything

Next I will try this:


And see if we've been successful.

I know that it can't see 2GB, but it'll do for a test.

Hmm, sill no IDE, I get either an error 8 or 21 and the drive isn't identified.

Better go back and buzz out the socket again see if I missed anything out.

That said it could be the formatting tool I have, so will look for options.

Well, it depends upon whether the CF card is able to operate in either 16 bit or 8 bit mode and/or natively swapped. Quite a lot of early IDE adapters won't work with modern CF cards. Only one CF card I found would work with my A4000, all the others weren't detected or were completely scrambled.

stephen_usher wrote: ↑Fri Jun 10, 2022 3:51 pm Well, it depends upon whether the CF card is able to operate in either 16 bit or 8 bit mode and/or natively swapped. Quite a lot of early IDE adapters won't work with modern CF cards. Only one CF card I found would work with my A4000, all the others weren't detected or were completely scrambled.

I've also tried with a real HDD and a Transcend 128MB flash module that plugs directly into the IDE connector and is of a similar vintage.

At present using HFORM 2.48) I get either Cannot read disk identity: disk error &21 or Cannot read disk identity: disk error &8 followed by a message about a missing variable at line 345, which I presume is due to the missing drive ID.
Aside from buzzing out to be sure I connected everything right, I will have a look at those errors, plus given that one buffer, IC49 died, the other, IC37 could also be bad, so replacing that is an option too.

So due to a schematic mis-read on my part, I found that I had a bit of rewiring to do on the IDE port.

Everything buzzes out correctly, though I'm still not able to format anything, but the 128MB flash module is recognised at least, so that's progress. The IDE busy light is now showing some activity.

Will just have to keep trying once I get back from the northwest.

Back from the north west and I powered the A5000 on, and it came on just perfectly, so pretty satisfied with the repairs so far, nice to have it pretty stable and the FDD all working good.

Some SCSI bits arrived too so I need to have a play with that again as well as the IDE stuff. Well, when I can find a spare minute...

Ok, so the SCSI drive I wanted to use isn't playing nicely, but I'm kind of not surprised, so I stole the 80MB drive from the Mac Classic (It booted perfectly up 1st time after sitting for several months! Yaay) and put the original 40MB drive back in the Mac.

The Mac will be fine, as the drive still has the original OS on it from years ago.

So, I had a drive, but no utilities.

Well, with the help of an emulator, I managed to extract the files I needed for the SCSI utilities, but using the PC to copy the files to a floppy proved problematic, because the files lose their 'type' when being copied, and they require this to run.

Apps seem to be similar to Mac in the respect that they have an 'app' which is like a folder and contains all the app needs to run.

As well as this, Windows seems to mash up the filenames, and whilst both can be reset, it's a huge pain.

However I discovered that if I copied the files to a network share, then copied them to the floppy via my MSTE with CosmosEx pointing to that share, whilst the types were still lost, the filename didn't get so badly mashed.

Then, using the files in the emulator as a guide, I corrected the mashed up names and types. Lo and behold, the SCSI utilities ran!!

Better than that, they saw the 80MB SCSI drive with no problem and let me format it, so I now have a hard drive

Here's all the testing lash up:


And the end result:


I'm also pleased to say that the new CMOS/RTC IC is running a treat and the machine is booting stably all the time and remembering the time. Happy days.

I've not managed to get the IDE working as yet, I think because it's sensitive to drive types, but I will persist and see what I can do, as I'd like to have it working.

I also need to start lacquering the repaired areas that I'm done with to be sure they are protected.