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Model II/16 cards questions

T

Tibs

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I managed to get a fully working enhanced Model II with the hard drive controller (Thats card is all I really wanted, so yay!...)

A few questions, because I’m going to scavenge it for the best parts and then hopefully find a good home for the Model II which does work and made it in one piece with just cheap compressible peanuts for packing....(sad head shake).

I have one of those 1MB boards, but this one came with a smaller 6MHZ board and two memory cards which I assume are 256k x 2 cards.

My 16 has the dog eared card with 256k and I was going to put the the 1MB card in its place once I get the RAM, whatever kind that is, I haven't done the research. I'm out of slots, so I need the most RAM on one card I can get for XENIX, and figured that would be enough for my plans. Whats the best way to tell what type of cards and how much memory is on them? I've been scouring and see things about modifying the older cards, piggy backing ram, etc/

It doesn't appear to have the PAL upgrade, and they are rare, but is there any reason its better than the dog eared one other than rare? I'm thinking it is better than the dog eared but is there any memory card compatibility issues with the dog eared?
 
If I recall, the dog eared version of the 68000 card wouldn't run any of the Xenix 3.x versions. However, my memory is pretty hazy today and I don't feel like reading up on it right now.
 
That’s true the PAL is needed for the unpatched Xenix on this card but with the patched it works on my 16a fine with dog eared.

I’d rather see a 16b or 6000 that needed a card get the flat one since the dog eared won’t fit. I dunno. Of course there is an 8mhz on eBay at a crazy high price and they don’t seem to know the value.

On to the hard drive interface card. Tries to boot from hard drive I bypass and load up Xenix and use diskutil and as soon as it attempts to access it crashes with garbage on screen. Same with diagnostics. Interface card passes all tests except status registers which is the first test. This is with known working drives. I tried a second one just to be sure and the drive is working fine on my model 4

I think it’s a rev none board and it doesn’t look like any tech bulletins were done on it or the hard drive.

Hddiag and hdrel both think the drive is powered off. I checked the jumpers they look right.

I haven’t really dug in deep yet just curious if these (type 2 card that is) things fail often and if so any tips on where? I’ll dig up the service guide for the 12 meg and card and see what I can find. I’m thinking a tech bulletin might solve this. Drive and computer were together.
 
Yes, we hacked Xenix 3 to run on all the 68K cards last year. There is a patched install disk in the model2archive. I'm pretty certain I tested thoroughly using a dog ear card in a 6000 with 1MB RAM board. However, I'm not sure if anyone else has tested it yet.

Definitely go through all the Hard Drive and Model 12 tech bulletins to make sure you're good there.

Maybe also try formatting the HD in TRSDOS-II and see if that works.

Which boot rom are you running?
 
pski said:
Yes, we hacked Xenix 3 to run on all the 68K cards last year. There is a patched install disk in the model2archive. I'm pretty certain I tested thoroughly using a dog ear card in a 6000 with 1MB RAM board. However, I'm not sure if anyone else has tested it yet.

Definitely go through all the Hard Drive and Model 12 tech bulletins to make sure you're good there.

Maybe also try formatting the HD in TRSDOS-II and see if that works.

Which boot rom are you running?
Click to expand...

As a 16A I think its the first of the two you had listed, but I'll have to check again. I ran HDREL on my model 4 for 12 hours last night in continuous to find any blocks, tested it again for the last three hours so I am pretty darn sure this drive is good. However, this 8x300 does not have the tech bulletins either, its like they are early production models. I'll spend the time doing the bulletins on both, but do the card first since I do have an 8x300 and a WD1000 based enclosure with all of them done, that will at least get me past that point.

So how the heck do you diagnose a card in a Model 2/16? that looks like a disaster waiting to happen.
 
Another question, the 12 Meg service manual states to change a resistor on the CPU board, what exactly do you change it to? heh. I might try this on the Model II it came with, just to see if the planets aligned. Kind of have two gimp arms this week so can't really play with the big boxes much.
 
Tibs said:
So how the heck do you diagnose a card in a Model 2/16? that looks like a disaster waiting to happen.
Click to expand...

oIPQBsO.jpg
 
Did the bulletins to the interface card that were missing, only the correction of pin 42/41 on the card edge was done before this. Working now, so the Model II must not have had the issues the Model 16 had for those bulletins to be relevant.

Xenix is formatting the drive, and I decided to go read war and peace.
 
Oh, and keep in mind, this drive's original 12 meg has the OS on it, and does appear to boot, but unless someone knows how to defeat the root password....well...
 
Next question, since I need 512K to run Xenix (and probably install it past the formatting), what chips are best to populate the 1MB card with (From rspi92), and I assume thats the most you can really put on that card, or is there a "hack" to do more. I saw a picture of one with stacked chips, but still searching for a method.

I'll just pull the graphics card for the time being.
 
Did Xenix have some means of booting to a minimal root shell from floppy, so that you could reset the passwords on the hard drive? I haven't gotten that far, because my 6000 is still waiting for me to fix its power supply.
 
I dont know, I just read the manual that said you're screwed if you lose it.

Its a type 2 card, and its working. I was able to format with Xenix 3.2.0, but when it tries to initialize it throws some hard drive errors.
I was able to get TRSDOS-II installed and booted just fine from hard drive.

I dont need to mess with the original 12 MB drive right now, I have it set aside and I'm using a ST-251-1 for now, but just telling the computer its 6/230 to speed things up because whew thats slow.

Just for giggles, I booted 1.3.5 I think thats it, and I'm trying to install it.

Interesting thing I discovered, the TI chips on the two 256 boards were causing issues, and the Tandy chips were good. Who would have thought. Anyway, I'll put in an order for the chips for the 1MB board in a day or two, and for now just using the two 256k cards.

Also, I think the short 6 MHZ card is defective, it throws 68k bughits. My main goal is to get the 16 working, but learned a ton this week already.

I probably need to go ahead and ensure all the 12 Meg bulletins are installed on the drive, it should have them but I dont know about HD:12, which is what I suspect fixed the Type 2 interface board. Either that or the one that fixes the reset line.
 
Oh, manuals will always say that. But to somebody who knows the system well enough and who has physical access, it's usually a lie. ;)
 
True. Been there have the scars. It’s only 1.3 and I doubt the data is interesting. I’ll let you know what I find. Password is probably password
 
Do you have some way to image the drive, such as with David Gesswein's MFM emulator? Then you could examine the contents of the image, and reformat the drive to your liking without losing any of the original data.
 
Ok, 1.3.5 installs fine on the drive. 3.2.0 (Custom for non PAL) throws this error:

Hard Drive 0: hard error 0449 while reading cylinder 0 head 0 sector 1.

I wonder if its expecting the Type 4 or WD controller. Pete have you installed this on a 12 Meg Drive with a 6MHZ board? It formats fine, but once you answer the Model II question, yes or no, it tries to access drive, drive goes into a bad state, and requires power down and up to reset. That tells me its sending a bad command.

I do have a primary and secondary Tandy 15 Meg that I could hook up, but this would require lots of work moving drives around. I'll do that if needed, just curious if I've found a situation that isn't compatible with 3.2.0.

Remember, this a 16A with 6MHZ Dog Eared and type 2 drive.

Till next time.
 
I ran into a similar problem with my Type 3 controller but with Xenix 1.03.05. You tell it to format and instantly fails at 0/0/1.

Does Xenix not have any known security holes one might use to get even partial root control?
 
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