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Kalok Model KL 320 - Copy Data

If you're going to use a cable without a 'twist' you need to jumper the floppy drive accordingly. Normally the jumper is set to the second position. Try moving it to the first position.
 
Stone said:
If you're going to use a cable without a 'twist' you need to jumper the floppy drive accordingly. Normally the jumper is set to the second position. Try moving it to the first position.
Click to expand...

That's not going to work. The PC convention is to have two motor enable lines, so just changing drive select won't work. The PC will still wind up pulling the wrong drive motor line low for A. You really need the twist.

Alternatively, you could change the drive select and then jumper the two motor enable lines together, which ought to work, as the drivers for these are OC. However, this may be just as unworkable as many newer 3.5" drives are fixed at DS1, not DS0.

Another approach would be to jumper DS0 and DS1 and the two motor enable lines at either the drive or controller. i.e. jumper pins (12 and 14) and (10 and 16); cf. PC floppy pinout
 
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Hi Guys,

IMG_5245 (Copy).JPG

This picture is of the cable that connects the hard disk drive discussed in the original post with the hard drive controller card that came from my uncle's computer.

The ribbon cable in the 5150 for the two floppy drives has female edge connectors for each 5-1/4 floppy drive and for the connection to the floppy controller card.

I tried using the cable from the hard drive system to connect the 3-1/2 floppy to the floppy controller card. It didn't work. Would that cable be expected to work for the floppy, or (as I may suspect) are the two cables configured differently?

In order to do this right I may just attempt to buy a proper cable if I can find one.

Through this all.... I am not terribly hopeful that we'll be able to resurrect the hard drive. I don't want to give up until we have tried every.

Thanks,

Jeff
 
The simplest way would be for you to find one of these:

IMG_00611-e1352036209667-1024x421.jpg


Used to be that they'd always be part of a 3.5-to-5.25 mounting kit. I've still got some, but I haven't seen one out in the wild for some time now. Maybe someone wants to start making them again for the vintage folks?
 
Jeff2016 said:
I tried using the cable from the hard drive system to connect the 3-1/2 floppy to the floppy controller card. It didn't work. Would that cable be expected to work for the floppy, or (as I may suspect) are the two cables configured differently?
Click to expand...
Yes. In the IBM PC family, a twisted cable for floppy drives is different to a twisted cable for hard drives. Photo [here].
 
Hello modem7,

Thanks for the clarification.

I'm looking around the for sale section. I'll also post a wanted ad.

If any of you guys knows of anyone who has a ribbon cable for sale, please let me know.

Thanks,

Jeff
 
Hi Guys,

Thanks to Stone for the ribbon cable. It arrived today in great shape.

I attached the cable to the floppy controller board and to the 3-1/2 floppy drive.

Once the computer was powered on, there was about a 30 or 40 second wait, then a beep, then the drive active light came on for a second or two, went off for less than a second, and then back on for about a second, and then it went off.

I was watching the monitor the whole time. As soon as the floppy drive stopped activity the BASIC screen appeared. There was no 601 error code... just the BASIC screen.

I created the boot disk as instructed earlier in this thread. I'm not sure if there is a problem with the boot disk or the disk drive (or the cabling).

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Jeff
 
Jeff2016 said:
I created the boot disk as instructed earlier in this thread. I'm not sure if there is a problem with the boot disk or the disk drive (or the cabling).

Any thoughts?
Click to expand...
The only way you'll know if all three are working properly is to check them all (one by one) in a system where everything is now working properly. You could be ballsy and try all three items simultaneously in another working system but if there is a failure you would then still need to resort to the one by one scenario anyway. I'd certainly try the boot disk first as it's the easiest. :)
 
Hi Stone,

Stone said:
The only way you'll know if all three are working properly is to check them all (one by one) in a system where everything is now working properly. You could be ballsy and try all three items simultaneously in another working system but if there is a failure you would then still need to resort to the one by one scenario anyway. I'd certainly try the boot disk first as it's the easiest. :)
Click to expand...

The easiest approach is to try the boot from the floppy disk with the floppy drive connected into the Pentium system. After that it gets complicated.

I'll keep you posted.

Thanks,

Jeff
 
Can you boot any other machine with your boot disk? Generally, the behavior that you're seeing indicates that the disk contains some sort of error that prevents booting.
 
Good Morning Everyone,

Thanks to all of you I was able to boot into DOS 3.3 using the 3-1/2 floppy drive.

I'm not really sure what the problem was, I followed the same procedure for preparing the boot disk. This time it worked.

The system booted and I was able to launch Speedstor. The hard drive was recognized.

There are a couple of things I need help with:

1. The display is terribly hard to read (some of the information is not readable). I am using a small flat panel television connected to the RCA jack on the CGA card. I did some Googling on the subject and found information that says that it is compatible with CGA. I was hoping there might be a command line switch that I could set; but, I can't find any documentation that provides this information.

2. Where I really need help is with advice on the best way to use the diagnostics. The goal is to preserve the data and to make it available for copy (and maybe even make the HDD bootable again. I don't want to make a mistake, though, and make the situation worse. Any advice on how I should proceed?

Thanks for the help.

Jeff
 
Can you get to the HD without running SpeedStor? If not you're not likely to get any data off the HD. SpeedStor's main function is to LLF the HD and doing that will not enable you to recover any data from the HD.
 
Hi Stone,

Stone said:
Can you get to the HD without running SpeedStor? If not you're not likely to get any data off the HD. SpeedStor's main function is to LLF the HD and doing that will not enable you to recover any data from the HD.
Click to expand...

I cannot get to the hard drive. If I attempt to change to the C drive I get a message that states "Invalid drive specification".

Maybe I misunderstood a couple of posts here. I thought that it was suggested that I go through the process of being able to run Speedstor because I wasn't able to get to the hard drive previously.

Maybe I'm dead in the water. Some form of data recovery might be my only option? (I'm not really sure what's on the HDD, so it's hard to justify the expense.)

Thanks again for all of your help.

Jeff
 
What happens when you run FDISK?

FWIW, SpeedStor also contains some controller diagnostics but it seems the controller is working. However, you can run the controller diags just to verify that it is.
 
Hi Stone,

When I run FDISK is get the error message "Error reading fixed disk".

I'll take another look at Speedstor. It's so hard to read that I want to make sure that I don't fat-finger something and hurt the drive any more than it already is.

Thanks,

Jeff
 
I don't think you can hurt it any more. It sounds like it needs a LLF to get it to work and even that's iffy.

All SpeedStor can do at this point is perform the LLF.
 
Jeff2016 said:
Maybe I misunderstood a couple of posts here. I thought that it was suggested that I go through the process of being able to run Speedstor because I wasn't able to get to the hard drive previously.
Click to expand...
Remember that you are on a forum, and can get different opinions from different people. Stone is basically saying that there is little point in running SpeedStor because it is not a data recovery tool. Yes, SpeedStor is not a data recovery tool, but it can be used in diagnosis. If I was in your particular situation, I sure would be interested to know if SpeedStor (and thus certain other software) can read all or part of the drive. For example:
* Can the drive seek to various cylinders ?
* Is it the case that all sectors can be read ?
* Is it the case that no sectors can be read ?
* Is it the case that some sectors can be read, but not all ?

For example, if the drive can seek, but read no sectors, further diagnosis may reveal an issue with the data cable (e.g. connected incorrectly).
 
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