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imi 5012-H

1

1ajs

Experienced Member
Joined
May 27, 2005
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452
Location
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
got a imi 5012-H

told the heads dont park them selfs it does spin up not sure how to talk to it
has a imi controller 500H atached to it (from a synclarviar)

can i just hook this up to a normal pc with a mfm controllor to do this or could i plug into it with a pc and talk to it as is? anyone know? prolly in the wrong section but worth seeing if anyone here has some ideas (would love to image the drive)

ksbvlm.jpg
 
Yep, that should be a normal MFM hard drive in there. (May also format OK on RLL) You can attach it to a PC and park the heads, but you will not be able do anything else with it unless you low-level format on your PC. But that would wipe all the data. (Geometry should be: Heads 4 Cylinders 306 Sectors 17 Write Precomp 214 Reduced Write Current 307 Capacity 10 MB)

I have no idea what a "synclarviar" is.

That appears to be a Corvus unit, the ones I have seen were for an Apple II. I think the Apple II software provided with these also had a head parking tool, but managing these things was crazy - had to constantly move the interface card between slots for their different utilities. No, the heads on these IMI drives do not park themselves.

If this is the Apple II version, it could be formatted two different ways. It would either be broken up in to a bunch of 140k Applesoft DOS 3.3 emulated floppy disks selectable as different "drives", or it would be formatted as an Apple UCSD P-System volume. They did not support ProDOS.

If that is for one of their other platforms, there is no telling how it would be formatted, but a PC would not be able to read it.

Others have mentioned a board that can emulate and supposedly "read" an existing MFM hard drive with any format, I think this is it: https://www.pdp8.net/mfm/mfm.shtml Something like that might be an option.
 
It's a 10MB MFM drive all right but from the looks of the cables it looks like it uses the 34-pin header IMI interface instead of the 'standard' ST506/412 20/34 card edge. What does the connector on the drive itself look like?

If it is an IMI interface it can be converted to ST506/412 or, conversely, there are systems with compatible IMI-interface controllers, but reading/writing the particular format actually used on the disk could be challenging...

m
 
its got the standard mfm card edge on the drive its self


john hill at ned tells me not worth my time as its not any format i could use and most like dead and a 50/50 chance the controllor is DOA and obsolete and slow
 
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MikeS said:
Ah, OK; I guess that's the data cable up in the top left and the control and second data cables are brought to the back panel, along with the (Corvus ?) interface.
Click to expand...


2 narrow cables one from the drive to the board and the other from the board to the back yes corect on that

wide cable has 2 ends with pings one to the board other end to the panel with the drive in the midle and a wide cable from the interface to the panel
 
Sorry for bumping up the old thread, I'm also dealing with IMI drive from the same era and the same Synclavier system. The drive that 1ajs is under the basic MFM specs ST412. It wouldn't be the problem to read outside with MFM PC controller or MFM-SCSI protocol converter, my case is a bit more unique, that makes me really puzzled.
The particular drive is IMI 5007 6MB drive, which is listed as MFM drive in IMI brochure. However I can't find any information about it, especially the actual interface. It's not ST412/506, it only has a single 26-pin connector. In the HDD bay you can also see IMI 5000H HDD controller which I'm not sure what the interface it has out.
My goal is to connect it to the PC to image it. Anybody knows the way to interface it to ST412 specs or any other PC compatible controller?
 

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k-Tracker said:
Sorry for bumping up the old thread, I'm also dealing with IMI drive from the same era and the same Synclavier system. The drive that 1ajs is under the basic MFM specs ST412. It wouldn't be the problem to read outside with MFM PC controller or MFM-SCSI protocol converter, my case is a bit more unique, that makes me really puzzled.
The particular drive is IMI 5007 6MB drive, which is listed as MFM drive in IMI brochure. However I can't find any information about it, especially the actual interface. It's not ST412/506, it only has a single 26-pin connector. In the HDD bay you can also see IMI 5000H HDD controller which I'm not sure what the interface it has out.
My goal is to connect it to the PC to image it. Anybody knows the way to interface it to ST412 specs or any other PC compatible controller?
Click to expand...
I'm not aware of any PC controllers for the IMI interface; they predate the PC a bit and AFAIK they were used in Apple and Cromemco computers with Corvus and Cromemco controllers

I do have a couple of 5007 drives and controllers, but the controller cards are S-100 Cromemco WDI-IIs, and even if you did manage to connect them to a system I expect that the actual format would quite likely be incompatible with yours.

What kind of system is it in?

mike
 
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MikeS said:
I'm not aware of any PC controllers for the IMI interface; they predate the PC a bit and AFAIK they were used in Apple and Cromemco computers with Corvus and Cromemco controllers

I do have a couple of 5007 drives and controllers, but the controller cards are S-100 Cromemco WDI-IIs, and even if you did manage to connect them to a system I expect that the actual format would quite likely be incompatible with yours.

What kind of system is it in?

mike
Click to expand...
Thank you Mike, it's from Synclavier, the music instrument. I don't need to get the whole 5000H controller running. If I can adopt 5007 drive directly to ST412/506 interface it will solve my problem. How different this MFM drive with 26 pin connector from common MFM drives? I only need to get a sector by sector image, I can open the filesystem with special tools.
 
I think it's probably not feasible to read the drive on another system; the interface is completely different from ST506 or IDE and the format of the data on the disk will probably also be incompatible.

Do you actually have a Synclavier working with that drive? If so, is there no way to export the data?

Someone was working on an emulator, but that probably won't help you; here's a link to the Cromemco WDI-II controller manual which probably tells you much more than you want to know about the interface.

The 5007 is called an HD5 by Cromemco.

 
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