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"removable disc/cartridge" SCSI drives that can act as a fixed disk drive

Jackson

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 11, 2015
Messages
349
Location
North Carolina
Do these exist? My two lovely internal Zip100 drives won't boot as a hard drive on my ST01 because they report the RMB bit, therefore it gets confused, sees the drive, but does not recognize it or report it's ID/LUN because it's removable...
 
Jaz drives do this. In fact IIRC you have to run software to be able to hot swap cartridges.
 
I'd get a different controller. I've been using those discs that way for as long as they've been round. But I doubt I've even seen an ST01.
 
Years ago I got a zip drive dirt cheap as they hit the shelves. Nice to have friends. Anyway I used it with my Mac II, probably hadn't upgraded it to a IIx at that point. It never was bootable, as the scsi address was fixed iirc. It would only occupy 6 or 7 on the acsi chain and was switch selectable iinm. Neither would it boot on a DEC 486 pizza box I obtained later, for the same reason. That thing was dreamy, it sync'ed right up to a 64khz fixed frequency monitor. I dropped a floppy disk on the open motherboard and it was always flakey after that. Can't say if a different scsi card would've made a difference, nothing back then afaik. I was using the proprietary Iomega controller with the DEC.
 
The internal drives support an ID of 0; so it shouldn't be much of a problem here. PLUS I do have another SCSI controller, the TMC-845, but I fear that the TMC-950 v8.2 BIOS won't even support the Zip drive as well; I tried booting it with the int 19h-based XUB floppy bootloader that someone posted here a while ago; BIOS couldn't find any drives, but SCSIDIAG works like a champ!

A shame too, since the low level format absolutely went fantastic! Drives were perfectly usable, I managed to get files working on there and there were no clicking symptoms.
 
Does your ST-01 have a bios chip? From what I recall, we used an ST-01 when building a hard drive card for our 30-286 and it did not have a bios and would only recognize a hard drive.

The other drive to try would be a Syquest 44 or 88 drive as they were able to act as a boot drive in our 486 with a Future Domain controller with a bios.
 
It does! Thanks for asking, it's a late variant with the v3.2 BIOS that supports non-Seagate drives.
 
It does! Thanks for asking, it's a late variant with the v3.2 BIOS that supports non-Seagate drives.
That's very cool. I think we had a 1.01 BIOS from an ST-02. Now that I think about it, we have quite a few SCSI cards we bought with drives just in case the drive wouldn't work with our Future Domain. These are all probably brand new in their packaging. It will be fun to find them and enjoy the memories.
 
It never was bootable, as the scsi address was fixed iirc.

External ZIP SCSI drives could be set to ID 5 or 6. You can't use ID 7 because that's reserved for the SCSI controller.

It is possible to make a bootable ZIP disk for 68k macs if you format the disk with the Mac version of Iomega's ZIP tools. I remember being able to boot a few crackerbox macs I had in the past from an external ZIP drive. Formatting a ZIP disk in the finder and moving over the system tools usually won't work, especially if it was a PC formatted ZIP disk.
 
While the Jaz and EZ135 Syquest solutions have been mentioned, there is also more notably the 44 and 88mb 5.25" Syquest drives and cartridges. There is also Bernoulli, but I do not remember if the later drives (not the original 10mb cartridges, which I KNOW you can boot from) supported booting.
 
If anyone can test their SyQuest EZ135/44/88MB drives on a Future Domain TMC-850 to see if it's BIOS can detect it, that would be nice to know.
 
If anyone can test their SyQuest EZ135/44/88MB drives on a Future Domain TMC-850 to see if it's BIOS can detect it, that would be nice to know.
We had a SyQuest 88 and 200MB connected on our Future Domain TMC-1680 in our 1990s 486 build and the BIOS saw both from what I recall. :cool:
 
That's the 16-bit variant though, with a BIOS designed for AT computers in mind. Not sure if the XT-designated v8.2 BIOS detects removable or fixed drives any different.
 
Some removable cartridge SCSI disks have a jumper to choose between fixed and removable disk modes. I have had to set some of my MO drives to fixed mode for really old SCSI controllers. I don't remember if the SyQuest drives had such an option, but I wouldn't be surprised, especially on the older 44 and 88 MB ones.

There are Iomega Bernoulli drives too, which are the somewhat related predecessor to the Zip disk. I had Bernoulli drives before Zip, I was highly disappointed with Zip after "upgrading!"
 
That's the 16-bit variant though, with a BIOS designed for AT computers in mind. Not sure if the XT-designated v8.2 BIOS detects removable or fixed drives any different.
True, but from what I recall Future Domain had the same SCSI drivers for all their platforms, so I think it would work the same at the bios level, even if the bios version is different.
Some removable cartridge SCSI disks have a jumper to choose between fixed and removable disk modes. I have had to set some of my MO drives to fixed mode for really old SCSI controllers. I don't remember if the SyQuest drives had such an option, but I wouldn't be surprised, especially on the older 44 and 88 MB ones.
I wish I was where I could take a look on our SQ200 drive, but from what I recall, there are no such jumpers. Now, that being said, from what I recall if you boot a drive with a cartridge in it, it literally showed up as a hard drive. Only with the driver did you get removability.
 
I have some SyQuest SCSI drives and cartridges somewhere; definitely 200MB, probably 88MB, 44MB and 1GB and 1.5GB. free for the price of a little gas...
 
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