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5170 FDD/HDD trouble

snq

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 29, 2009
Messages
164
Location
Sweden, way up north
I recently added 2 more IBM machines to my collection, namely a 5160 and a 5170. Each came with a color monitor. I suspect the 5160 has had a little electricity accident as the power supply is dead and one of the monitors won't power on either. My father will try to repair the monitor but for now I'll have to do with one.
Anyway both machines were mostly disassembled and I'm trying to get them up and running again. Not the easiest task, it's been almost 20 years since I last used any of these and back then I just used them, never had to tinker with them. I got a whole load of parts with them and I hope it's gonna be enough to get them both back to working condition.

I started out with the 5170, as it actually powered up after putting some bits and pieces in it. At first I got nothing but 601 and 162 errors and it would only boot to Basic. Amongst the parts were 4 5.25'' drives as well as a 3.5'' one, all different, and I had no idea which one was what or what the system was configured for. On top of that there were also different controllers amongst the parts and I did not know which one had last been used. Thanks to a tool I found on the forums I was finally able to configure the system from basic, and boot from the 5.25'' drive. So now the machine finally was somewhat usable.

I wanted to add the 3.5'' FDD to it to hopefully make it a bit easier to transfer files. The most I've gotten it to do was give me a partial dir listing after which the machine hung. Other than that it makes the right sound when booting etc. It's configured as a 720k drive because that's the only type of 3.5'' available in the configuration program.
I have no idea what kind of drive it is though. It may very well be a 1.44M, I just don't know. It's a TEAC FD-35HFN-22-U, part number 19307240-22. I have not been able to find any info about it. The same model with 33-U instead of 22-U seems to be a 1.44 but that doesn't tell me much.
Does anyone happen to know what kind of drive this is?

Next, harddrives. I got 5 HDDs with this stuff. 4 of them full height, and one of them half height. They are all Seagate drives. The half height one is an ST225, next we have 2 ST4038s, an ST4026 and an ST412. The 412 was in the XT which I guess is where it belongs.
Now for the problem.. I haven't been able to get any of the other ones working in the AT. After connecting them and selecting the type in the configuration, the system will hang for a while, give me a 1780 error, and then after pressing F1 boot from floppy.

I'm not sure what this 1780 error means. Something is obviously not right, but I don't know if this means the drive is toast or if it may be usable.
"1780 Time out for hard drive 0 at IPL -- No IPL Capability - Try formatting".
I first gave fdisk a try, it gave me an error that said something about not being able to read the fixed disk, or something. I had a floppy with CheckIt, and did a disk check, which gave me a whole bunch of "Too Damaged to Report.". So I figure a low level format is the next step. There was one floppy labeled low level format, but it was unreadable.....

So this is pretty much where I'm stuck. I can't transfer any files onto a 5.25'' drive because I don't have any other systems that have a 5.25'' drive (I ordered a cable though so hopefully I'll soon have a 5.25 in my main system, I apparently threw out all of these cables years ago). And I can't use 3.5'' disks because the AT won't read them.

What I have to work with is IBM DOS 3.30 (with debug.exe) and there's some floppies labeled MS-DOS 3.something as well.

The HDD is the most important as far as I'm concerned, but I wouldn't mind having a working 3.5'' drive either.
So, can anyone tell me what the next step in my adventure would be? :)



(This turned out to be quite a bit more text than I originally planned, I hope anyone made it through all of it, to make up for it I'll add some pictures ;))
IMG_0034.jpg IMG_0033.jpg IMG_0035.jpg IMG_0032.jpg
 
I have no idea what kind of drive it is though. It may very well be a 1.44M, I just don't know. It's a TEAC FD-35HFN-22-U, part number 19307240-22. I have not been able to find any info about it. The same model with 33-U instead of 22-U seems to be a 1.44 but that doesn't tell me much.
Does anyone happen to know what kind of drive this is?

It's a 1.44M drive (FD-35HF tells that much), but a pretty old one (the 35 tells me that it's a half-height 3.5" drive). Be sure that you use DS2D (720K) media in it rather than DSHD media. Given the age of the drive, you might be better off using a more modern 1/3 hieght drive (e.g. FD-235HF).

Next, harddrives. I got 5 HDDs with this stuff. 4 of them full height, and one of them half height. They are all Seagate drives. The half height one is an ST225, next we have 2 ST4038s, an ST4026 and an ST412. The 412 was in the XT which I guess is where it belongs.
Now for the problem.. I haven't been able to get any of the other ones working in the AT. After connecting them and selecting the type in the configuration, the system will hang for a while, give me a 1780 error, and then after pressing F1 boot from floppy.

Have you low-level formatted them before trying to use them? That's probably required. There are several posts on this forum that discuss this, so I won't go into details.
 
It's a 1.44M drive (FD-35HF tells that much), but a pretty old one (the 35 tells me that it's a half-height 3.5" drive). Be sure that you use DS2D (720K) media in it rather than DSHD media. Given the age of the drive, you might be better off using a more modern 1/3 hieght drive (e.g. FD-235HF).
Thanks for the tip! It is indeed a half height drive. All newer 1/3 height drives I have had the connector the wrong way around so the adaptor wouldn't fit (power cables too short on the adaptor). So I made a little extender and started trying my drives one at a time. Regular HD disks weren't working out too well, got errors all the time. I figured this was because it was still configured as a 720k drive. Offered up a DD disk and after formatting it on the AT, I could actually read from and write to it on my Win7 machine in 720k format (same machine refused to format it, even from a dos virtual machine). So I ran GSetup which let me change the type to 1.44M and now it seems to read everything :)
I'll try putting the other drive back with this config later on to see what happens then.

Have you low-level formatted them before trying to use them? That's probably required. There are several posts on this forum that discuss this, so I won't go into details.
I had/have not low level formatted it because I had no way of getting the tools onto the machine. Now I do but they all keep telling me no physical drives were found. I'm playing around a bit with different cables etc but so far to no avail. The drive I'm testing with is the ST225, as it makes the least horrible noise of the bunch ;)
 
Are you certain that you're using a hard drive control cable on the drives (and not a floppy cable?)? The cable should be flat (no twists). The drive select on the drive should be set to the first one (DS0 or DS1, depending on the manufacturer's labeling).

Whose hard drive controller are you using?
 
I'm using what I think is the original controller for the machine. My BIOS has a date of 11/15/85 and the controller is one of these:
http://members.dodo.com.au/~slappanel555/misc/5170_hard_floppy_controller_second_revision.jpg

There was no flat cable without twists included in the parts so I used a gray one with 3 connectors, one that goes on the controller, one labeled D and one labeled C where wires 5-9 were twisted. I had the drive connected to C all this time because that seemed like the logical thing to do. But I just found out 5 mins ago that connecting it to D actually made it detectable by diskman.
It's being ll formatted as we speak! :)


Something related.. I have a card that looks to be a 16 bit IDE controller. It's from Octek, part number 890100 rev 1.1. It has a harddrive and floppy connector and a couple of jumpers. I have no documentation whatsoever though so I don't know what the jumpers do. Anyone know more about this card? I can take a pic if needed.
 
Well, partial success! The formatting procedure went fine, and I now have a C drive!
One problem remaining though, the machine won't boot from the harddrive. The partition is active and system transfered from IBM DOS 3.3 startup disk. I'm not sure if there's anything else I should do?

It won't boot from the 1.44 drive either for that matter, I tested the disk in a different system and it boots fine with it there. This was MS-DOS 6.something though, oldest I could find for now so it may be too new for the AT?
 
Where did you find the tool to configure the CMOS from BASIC? I just got my 5170 today, haven't tested it yet.

Thanks,
Sean
Here: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?15197-IBM-AT-BASIC-code-to-set-up-CMOS-RTC


I just managed to make the drive bootable by reformatting (high level format) using format /s from the bootdisk. The original format was done by diskman, which apparently must've forgotten to copy something :)
Now the real fun can start.. And I have 4 more drives to test. Thanks for the help so far!
 
Quick update.. Tested 4 out of 5 disks now, and so far 3 of them are working fine, only one of the ST4038s was full of badness. The other one didn't even need a low level format. Only one I haven't tested yet is the ST412, will test that one tomorrow.
The old TEAC floppydrive is also working fine now!

Still won't boot from the 3.5'' drive though, which would be handy if I'm going to get anything other than IBM DOS 3.3 on the harddrives, not that I really need it.

Evidence!
IMG_0040.jpg
 
Okay, describe your configuration with the 3.5" drive (how it's connected), the media that you're using and how you're formatting the system disk. There's no reason that it shouldn't work. I'm guessing that you've overlooked something. If necessary, I think I have the jumper settings for that drive. I'm assuming that once you've booted from either the hard disk or a 5.25" floppy, you're formatting and transferring the system to the 3.5" drive.
 
My first drive is the 5.25'', a 1.2M one and configured as 1.2M. Tested both 360k and 1.2M media in this and it reads/writes/boots from both types.
The second is the 3.5'', configured using gsetup as 1.44 and reads/writes 720k/1.44M media but won't boot from anything. The Diagnostics disk has no option for 1.44M, I can only select 720 there. With that selected, it will read/write only 720k media but still won't boot from it.
The flat cable has 2 labels, A and B, 5.25 is on A, 3.5 on B connector. Cable has a different twist than the HD cable.
The controller is what I think is the original one for the later ATs, floppy cable connected to J1. I haven't touched the jumpers on the controller because I don't know what does what.

The 3.5'' drive does have a bunch of jumpers, here's a list of the labels:
US1
US0
RE
RY
DC (set)
MS
D3
D2
D1 (set)
D0
FG (set)

And yes, the method of making the disks bootable is formatting and transferring the system. I've tried doing this from the harddrive, from a 5.25'' floppy, from a different system, and by writing a bootdisk image straight to the floppy.
Using the TEAC drive or another doesn't seem to make a difference either, it won't boot from it no matter what.
 
I guess I am, yea.
Did I just make a fool out of myself? ;) It's been a loooong time since I had anything with more than 1 floppydrive...
 
Well, that did the trick, problem solved, so thanks for the hint! Never even crossed my mind that it wouldn't boot from drive B.
 
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