famicomaster2
Experienced Member
Hello, as mentioned in my other thread, I am attempting to recover data from several vintage hard disks (which came with controllers) that were given to me by a friend of the family. Large cardboard box of mostly MFM/RLL drives and controllers.
The current pair is:
DTC 5150XL (BIOS CXD23A) and a Shugart 712.
The Shugart drive is working fine. It spins up, seeks to track 0 and asserts it's READY signal like it's supposed to. However, during the boot process, one of two things will happen:
-Nothing happens at all and the machine hangs
-1701 error and the machine hangs
It definitely is hanging, I can leave it for an hour and come back to no change at all. Sometimes even control+alt+delete does not work, and I have to hit the reset button on the computer.
However, I have noticed that if I leave the control interface of the disk disconnected during the boot, I only get "Primary master hard disk fail" and I can press F1 to continue to boot to DOS, at which point I can reconnect the drive. Some software, such as HDAT.COM can actually still access the drive - It passes a seek test and despite some read errors it seems to be able to read/write/verify from the disk just fine.
Unfortunately, because the machine booted without it connected, almost no software is aware of it's presence. I am thinking this is because the CMOS flag for it is cleared for the "disk fail" message.
The way I see it, there are two solutions here: I can "spoof" the CMOS results to make software see the drive after it has booted. I was at one point aware of a utility which could do this, but it has been many years.
The other solution is to just "fix" the 1701 error. Does anyone have a readout on what DTC's error codes are? I have not found a listing anywhere, and I've only got their little installation manual which is similarly unhelpful. 1701 is a general disk system fault, but it is also printing numbers in parenthesis in what seems like an attempt to be more helpful.
Tl;dr Can I force DOS software to recognize a drive that wasn't present on boot, or how do I fix a generic 1701 error?
Thanks in advance for any help.
EDIT: Added 5150XL BIOS revision
The current pair is:
DTC 5150XL (BIOS CXD23A) and a Shugart 712.
The Shugart drive is working fine. It spins up, seeks to track 0 and asserts it's READY signal like it's supposed to. However, during the boot process, one of two things will happen:
-Nothing happens at all and the machine hangs
-1701 error and the machine hangs
It definitely is hanging, I can leave it for an hour and come back to no change at all. Sometimes even control+alt+delete does not work, and I have to hit the reset button on the computer.
However, I have noticed that if I leave the control interface of the disk disconnected during the boot, I only get "Primary master hard disk fail" and I can press F1 to continue to boot to DOS, at which point I can reconnect the drive. Some software, such as HDAT.COM can actually still access the drive - It passes a seek test and despite some read errors it seems to be able to read/write/verify from the disk just fine.
Unfortunately, because the machine booted without it connected, almost no software is aware of it's presence. I am thinking this is because the CMOS flag for it is cleared for the "disk fail" message.
The way I see it, there are two solutions here: I can "spoof" the CMOS results to make software see the drive after it has booted. I was at one point aware of a utility which could do this, but it has been many years.
The other solution is to just "fix" the 1701 error. Does anyone have a readout on what DTC's error codes are? I have not found a listing anywhere, and I've only got their little installation manual which is similarly unhelpful. 1701 is a general disk system fault, but it is also printing numbers in parenthesis in what seems like an attempt to be more helpful.
Tl;dr Can I force DOS software to recognize a drive that wasn't present on boot, or how do I fix a generic 1701 error?
Thanks in advance for any help.
EDIT: Added 5150XL BIOS revision
Last edited: