Sorry, need another recommendation for 5.25" drive problem

[kenp]

I have, it turns out, several 360K 5.25" floppy disk drives.  (I thought one was a 1.2M drive then I checked the part number again.)

 

One of these drives, one of my original two from the old days, is only partially working.  I've cleaned the heads, I've checked the jumpers against the other working drive from the old days and they match.  I've matched the termination resistors in them and still get an odd behaviour.  The suspect drive seems to work just fine in single density, even double sided single density.  In SSSD or DSSD I can initialize and write the DOS files to a disk and then boot from that disk.  Okay, fine it works for single density.  I have even booted from a DSDD disk as long as that disk was initialized and the DOS files written on one of the other drives.  (now can you guess what's coming?  of course you can.) 

 

If I try to initialize a disk in double density I get an Error 173.  Now this is a disk that was initialized on another drive so I'm fairly certain it's not the disk.  When trying to initialize the disk it takes some extra time between steps in the early part of the process then speeds up to a more normal pace after that.  I haven't tried just writing to a disk in that drive since it seems to me that if a drive cannot initialize the disk it wouldn't be likely to do a plain write, either.  Or, maybe I just wouldn't trust it to write or even read double density properly.

 

Has anyone run into something like this before and were they able to get it sorted out?  Or, if no one has faced this here, where might be a good place to ask for advice on some of the weirder problems that the old floppy drives can run into?

 

(Yeah, I've got a spare that I didn't think I had but things like this can just take over the old thinking processes and get me nowhere.)

 

[_The Doctor__]

Only the drive at the end of the chain should be terminated,

the drive might need rails cleaned and lubed sensors dusted out.

make sure of the drives spec and rpms.

check upper head is clean, and pressure is correct. Never push up on or twist the upper head while cleaning, the head can become misaligned on it's radial axis.

In order to fix that requires tedium with a scope and alignment disks.

 

[kenp]

I'm only connecting one drive at a time for the tests so they have matching termination resistors ( so I don't have to move resistors around when I change drives. )

 

Scopes look to be a lot easier to come by than in the old days.  Seems we can get a gadget that you can connect to the PC that acts as a scope and it would be fast enough for this sort of work.  Getting an alignment disk for these old drives might be another matter.  The speed test, hmmm?  I bet there are labels one could print and apply to the direct drive motor for the speed test.  But everything seems to work fine in single density

 

There must be something about the difference between single and double density.  They use the same tracks.  They use the same signal strength on the same media.  Gonna have to look into the difference between single and double density more.  Didn't need to know in the old days, things just worked 'cause they were new.

 

But I'm beginning to think I might be obsessing about getting things back into the exact state they were 40 years ago and that's likely just not going to happen.  There aren't enough spare parts easily available without a time machine.  If I have even a single drive that works, that should be sufficient to shift things to solid state storage, yes?

 

(In sorting through the disks I found a small set of SpartaDOS formatted disks that, by the labels, will likely hold most of my old work.  Every one of them is mildewed.  😞  )

[+kheller2]

What hardware are you using to connect this to the Atari?

 

[kenp]

21 minutes ago, kheller2 said:

What hardware are you using to connect this to the Atari?

 

Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.  A dreaded ATR8000. 

 

It was a great gadget at the time but it's become a bit of a challenge now that I'm trying to revive everything AND introduce newer gadgets like the FujiNet.  And then the problem becomes whether to actually keep it around after I do get what I want transferred.  There are so many better options like the FujiNet and SIO2PC cables and software and such.

 

If I pursue the cleaning of the mildewed disks to see what they have, this process may go on for quite some time.

 

And then there are the 8" drives that, by the sound of them, will need some heavy servicing to bring back into action to see what's on the 8" floppy disks.  (And I haven't checked them for mildew, yet.  Oh no.)

 

So, I have an ATR8000, two 5.25" floppy drives with sticker numbers and letters naming them drives 1 and 2 for the Atari and A and B for CP/M and two 8" drives that are labelled as drives 3 and 4 for the Atari or C and D for CP/M and, of course, lots of 5.25 and 8 inch floppies with labels for both types of software, Atari and CP/M.  Either I had all this running in one installation at one time or in a fit of madness I set all this up 40 years ago as a giant joke to drive myself crazy now.

[kenp]

And soon after I wrote those words I discovered another thing.  One of the edge connectors on the cable for the floppy drives was failing.  If the angle of the flat cable to the drive was just right it would force the connector to connect to the card edge on the floppy drive but any other difference in tension or angle and it wouldn't connect.  I found a local shop that carries the IDC edge connectors and a tool for pressing the connectors on the cable and fixed that.  I was also lucky enough, maybe, to find a replacement 360K floppy disk drive.  So, at the moment I don't have a drive with the 2 and B tags on it but I do have two working 360K floppy drives and I'm going to start shifting images from the floppies to the Fujinet. 

 

At some time in the future, I'll pull the 8" floppy drives out of storage again and do some solid work on them to see if I can get them working again.  Or, if the shop where I found the replacement 5.25" drive can get their 8" floppy drives working, I might simply rent a working drive to transfer what I can from the 8" floppies I have.

 

But, here is the state of the machine as it sits and I'm more pleased than not with how it is working, Atari 130XE with the 320K memory upgrade, the ATR8000 for the floppy disks interface and two 360K 5.25" floppy disk drives in the original cabinet from when the set was new.  I didn't have the Fujinet plugged in when this was taken but it wouldn't show much.  If I cannot find a way to get the original second drive working the new beige drive is from the same manufacturer and it would be possible to swap the face plates to make them look like a matched set again.

[macsonny]

6 hours ago, kenp said:

And soon after I wrote those words I discovered another thing.  One of the edge connectors on the cable for the floppy drives was failing.  If the angle of the flat cable to the drive was just right it would force the connector to connect to the card edge on the floppy drive but any other difference in tension or angle and it wouldn't connect.  I found a local shop that carries the IDC edge connectors and a tool for pressing the connectors on the cable and fixed that.  I was also lucky enough, maybe, to find a replacement 360K floppy disk drive.  So, at the moment I don't have a drive with the 2 and B tags on it but I do have two working 360K floppy drives and I'm going to start shifting images from the floppies to the Fujinet. 

 

At some time in the future, I'll pull the 8" floppy drives out of storage again and do some solid work on them to see if I can get them working again.  Or, if the shop where I found the replacement 5.25" drive can get their 8" floppy drives working, I might simply rent a working drive to transfer what I can from the 8" floppies I have.

 

But, here is the state of the machine as it sits and I'm more pleased than not with how it is working, Atari 130XE with the 320K memory upgrade, the ATR8000 for the floppy disks interface and two 360K 5.25" floppy disk drives in the original cabinet from when the set was new.  I didn't have the Fujinet plugged in when this was taken but it wouldn't show much.  If I cannot find a way to get the original second drive working the new beige drive is from the same manufacturer and it would be possible to swap the face plates to make them look like a matched set again.

What does the ATR8000 actually do?

[ggn]

22 minutes ago, macsonny said:

What does the ATR8000 actually do?

If nothing else, it sure looks like an awesome monitor stand

 

(I also keep forgetting what it does, so I had a look at https://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n4/ATR8000.html)

[kenp]

18 hours ago, macsonny said:

What does the ATR8000 actually do?

It acts as a grand interface from the Atari SIO port to a set of industry standard (at the time) ports that included a floppy disk port, a parallel printer port and an RS232 port or you could boot it into CP/M and work in that world using the Atari as the terminal. 

 

Since I had an older S100 based IMSAI 8080 CP/M machine already with floppy drives, printer and modem I consolidated the two systems into one using the ATR8000.  At one point I had four floppy disk drives, two 5.25" and two 8" drives.  I've gotten the system back working to my satisfaction with the 5.25" drives.  Using industry standard 5.25" drives and either MyDOS or SpartaDOS each floppy disk could hold 360K instead of only 90K or 130K.  The 8" drives are going to take considerably more work to bring back to life.  I think they were about a megabyte each on a floppy with those.  Pretty big stuff from those days. 

 

The old printer and modems are long gone but replaced with newer options that the ATR8000 cannot interface to.  And I've purchased a FujiNet device to bring everything up to the modern age.  Figuring out how to get the ATR8000 and the FujiNet working together has been interesting but it's working for what I need.  Now I'm going to be moving what I can from the old floppy disks to the FujiNet SD card and then over to one of my Linux machines.  I can set up a local tnfs server from there and be able to see all the old floppy images on the local Wi-Fi through the FujiNet.

 

Have to admit the FujiNet is an amazing device.  I still haven't tapped into all of its potential.