exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hello,

I have 2 harddrives ACSI2STM devices that work on some other atari perfectly (so I exclude cables and so on).
But for the one I need to use, it does not works, it is not detected and I land on the desktop with drive A & B icons.

- I tested the HDD port with multimeter : no issue
- I tried to switch with another DMA from an Atari that works : same results
- I Tried another 74LS245N (the one in front of the port) : same results
- I Tried HDD diagnostic tools but those never found the device.

I have been told the boot sequence is checking floppy then Hard drive.

But it seems it never check the hard drive.

I don't what else I should check,

Mother board revision is : CA400329à GX 211 VO 3489 TOS 1.62

I did not find yet a descent schematics that would help me to do clever checks.

I have been reading this too : https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv4n ... tools.html but my case is not listed there.

Any advise would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

p0ke wrote: 24 Jan 2024 17:07 But for the one I need to use, it does not works, it is not detected and I land on the desktop with drive A & B icons.
I don't what else I should check

What FW version is on the ACSI2STM?

p0ke wrote: 24 Jan 2024 17:07 I did not find yet a descent schematics that would help me to do clever checks.

https://github.com/retro16/acsi2stm

That's 5.0a version with gemdrive.

About the schematics, I thought more about the atari motherboard schematics.

Thanks

I think since it is a fairly active GitHub project it might be a good idea to open an issue there. There might be a debug/log feature you can access.

I'll do.
How can i ensure it is not atari motherboard hardware issue ?

Well, if the unit is working on other Ataris, it's probably your STe. Do you have good PSU? 5V is good? Changed caps on the PSU or is it the original 30y old one?

Try changing the processor for a HC type. It fixes it for some people. You could also try and add 10K pullup resistors on the 8 data lines that is connected between the DMA chip, ACSI-port and WD1772 chip.

DoG wrote: 24 Jan 2024 19:10 Well, if the unit is working on other Ataris, it's probably your STe. Do you have good PSU? 5V is good? Changed caps on the PSU or is it the original 30y old one?

Try changing the processor for a HC type. It fixes it for some people. You could also try and add 10K pullup resistors on the 8 data lines that is connected between the DMA chip, ACSI-port and WD1772 chip.

I have Exxos PSU (fresh and new) running like a charm.
I'll try the pull-up resistor on the DMA chip.
I can try to switch 68k from other atari to this one ? might help ?

Just changed 68k, same result, but Atari seems to boot faster.
Will wait to try 10k pull up resistors before going for 68k HC.

Is it possible that one specific hard drive line could be broken somewhere ? Does anybody heard of this before ?

Which hard drive image are you using?

Can you try the emutos image from here (rename to acsi2stm/hd0.img on your SD card).

https://sd4st.uk.to/wp-content/uploads/ ... x256MB.zip

I tend to find my TOS 2.06 equipped STE doesn't like seeing the ACSI2STM unless I use an ICDPRO configured image. My other STE with Emutos in hardware rom doesn't care and works fine with plain images.

This suggestion only applies if you're using Windows to prepare the SD cards:

For a long time I assumed that (in this case) the Uwe Seimet HD drivers didn't work for me - I have an STe and a Pico drive from the Exxos store. Originally I was using Windows 11 to write the images.

One day I had the bright idea to try the 'dd' command in Linux and it worked first time.

Probably just a combination of Windows 11 and my ancient USB front panel, but it's worth a try if you can.