djglish Posted August 10, 2023 Share Posted August 10, 2023 Is there any way to upgrade a SH204 Hard drive unit to a larger SCSI drive? I can't tell if the unit is starting up. I tried running the ICD Pro software and it doesn't see the drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TGB1718 Posted August 11, 2023 Share Posted August 11, 2023 If the drive is powering up, you should be able to hear it running, also you can usually "feel" it's running. It should do this with just the power connected, although there can be a jumper to set autostart. What hard drive are you using ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TZJB Posted August 11, 2023 Share Posted August 11, 2023 13 hours ago, djglish said: Is there any way to upgrade a SH204 Hard drive unit to a larger SCSI drive? I can't tell if the unit is starting up. I tried running the ICD Pro software and it doesn't see the drive. The hard drive in a SH204 is normally an MFM or RLL type together with a SCSI controller board and a host adapter. If you can't hear if the hard drive is spinning you may have a power supply problem which will first need servicing. It is possible to upgrade an MFM/RLL drive for a larger one, but there may be problems with substituting for a native SCSI hard drive due to the host adapter firmware, and also the power supply itself being insufficient. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
djglish Posted August 11, 2023 Author Share Posted August 11, 2023 The drive does appear to spin up. I can see the activity LED lighting up and hear beeps and drive access noises. I downloaded the Atari HD software and will tryt hat today. I had been using the ICD Pro software to try and see the drive. It's ID check program doesn't find the device on the DMA bus. It still has the original 20MB drive in it from what I can tell. I tried unplugging the SCSI cable from the host adapter and hooking up a 105MB Quantum SCSI drive. Just got some beeps and it didn't appear to see the drive either. Once again, maybe using the Atari HD software will help. I watched a video on Youtube that showed using a boot disk to access and format the drive. i don't have an Atari boot disk. I'll play around with it and let you know if I have any success. I'm guessing that the drive may have been wiped and needs to be reformatted and partitioned before it's usable. It would be great if the SCSI adapter in the case was able to take the larger drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TZJB Posted August 11, 2023 Share Posted August 11, 2023 50 minutes ago, djglish said: The drive does appear to spin up. I can see the activity LED lighting up and hear beeps and drive access noises. I downloaded the Atari HD software and will tryt hat today. I had been using the ICD Pro software to try and see the drive. It's ID check program doesn't find the device on the DMA bus. It still has the original 20MB drive in it from what I can tell. I tried unplugging the SCSI cable from the host adapter and hooking up a 105MB Quantum SCSI drive. Just got some beeps and it didn't appear to see the drive either. Once again, maybe using the Atari HD software will help. I watched a video on Youtube that showed using a boot disk to access and format the drive. i don't have an Atari boot disk. I'll play around with it and let you know if I have any success. I'm guessing that the drive may have been wiped and needs to be reformatted and partitioned before it's usable. It would be great if the SCSI adapter in the case was able to take the larger drive. ICD Pro should be all that you need for an ST hard drive unless it is very large. I think that the Atari HD software is more basic in my opinion. If the original drive is spinning up then your 12V supply is good. You may need to check with a voltmeter that the 5V supply is equally as good as it will be supplying the host adapter and controller boards. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TGB1718 Posted August 11, 2023 Share Posted August 11, 2023 Unfortunately I don't know what Atari did in their SCSI interface, but in theory it should work with any (depending on size) SCSI hard disk, I would have thought 105MB was not too big for it. When you run ICDBOOT you should see the drive there as it initializes the driver. If it doesn't see it there you won't see it in any of the utilities as they all require ICDBOOT to have been run and detect the drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
djglish Posted August 11, 2023 Author Share Posted August 11, 2023 No luck, so far. I've tried the Atari HD software and the ICD software. Neither one sees the drive on the ID check programs. With the ICD software I ran it both on bootup from the disk and separately after from the A drive. Hooked up the 105MB drive and it doesn't see that either. Tried a different DB19 cable (known to work) and that didn't help. Id like to try the HDDRIVER software, but I'm not planning on keeping this unit and don't want to spend the money to buy it. I might try downloading the demo and see if that does anything. I was given the drive by a friend that used to have it on his BBS back in the day. No disks came with it. I'm trying to get this and some other Atari items ready for the Vintage Compute Fair Midwest next month. It's time to clear out some space in the basement. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
351cougar Posted August 14, 2023 Share Posted August 14, 2023 do you have an ICD or similar scuzzy card that you could use to replace the scsi in the 204 and plug the mfm adapter into that . since you dont see any response to connections and that 204 scsi is the first thing in line in the connection Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tillek Posted August 15, 2023 Share Posted August 15, 2023 3 hours ago, 351cougar said: do you have an ICD or similar scuzzy card that you could use to replace the scsi in the 204 and plug the mfm adapter into that . since you dont see any response to connections and that 204 scsi is the first thing in line in the connection He and I actually talked about helping him with trying to recover what's on the drive as a BBS would be of interest to us in the BBS community. I'm pretty well stocked with a variety of controllers, host adapters, tools, etc. And Lord knows I've spent many a sleepless night recovering things from my own damaged drives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dankcomputing Posted September 20, 2023 Share Posted September 20, 2023 (edited) The ACSI-SASI (yes, SASI) bridge that shipped in the SH204 will only work with the oldest of SCSI drives - nothing bigger than 80 megs in theory and nothing bigger than 40MB in practice. I've only gotten the tall-mech Quantum ProDrives to work and 10 years later they're starting to all die off because a piece of rubber inside the drive is melting into crude oil. I never even tried the MFM drive on the MFM-SASI bridge that comes inside, just chucked all of it immediately. I don't F- with MFM. If you have to though, I hear this may work. Assembled, it's probably going to be more than a SatanDisk, but it's the only solution I know of with the potential to recover data from the MFM drive. It may also be possible to configure a ZuluSCSI to work, but at that point you're also hurtling towards a SatanDisk budgetwise. The SH204 is roomy enough inside to accommodate a different, better ACSI-SCSI bridge - thanks to t0ri it's possible to reproduce a number of them, only issue is finding the components and building them. Edited September 20, 2023 by dankcomputing Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jfcatari Posted September 21, 2023 Share Posted September 21, 2023 (edited) I would recommend the following project: https://github.com/retro16/acsi2stm I created an alt board here that is simple and all through hole design. This board is based on the design in the original above. https://github.com/jfceklosky/acsi2stm-alt-hardware I am planning on building the DB-19 version and placing them on ebay (at cost plus a small assembly fee). Edited September 21, 2023 by Jfcatari Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TGB1718 Posted September 21, 2023 Share Posted September 21, 2023 I have an OMTI3527 that I used with an old Syquest 10M removable drive which is MFM, I hooked it up to the ST with an IDC interface, still works (sort of, very noisy) I think the drive has seen better days, it formats the drive, maps out the bad sectors, but fails when writing the partition information OMTI 3520A, OMTI 3527A.pdf Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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