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Replacing hard drive in Tandy 1110HD

samalex

New Member
Joined
Jul 6, 2009
Messages
1
Location
Waco, Texas
I have a Tandy 1110HD that I haven't booted in probably 5+ years, and today when I pulled it out and booted it up it's giving a Hard Disk Read Failure. I don't have the original manual, but i did find this link which shows how to get to the hard drive - http://www.8bit-micro.com/1110HD-repairs.htm . and from this I'm guessing it's an XT-IDE drive (40-pin). If so is there any way to find one of these? I have a Toshiba T1000SE that I can't find the power cable for, so possibly I could steal the drive from it, not sure. Also is there any option to use one of those IDE to SD Micro or Compact Flash converts?

And secondly does anyone know if there's a way to get a new battery or even somehow replace the cells in the existing battery?

Thanks for any input. I'd love to breath more life into this little system. thanks --

Sam
 
I have a couple of these and I have been getting the spare parts together to restore the last one (floppy belt, some fuses, the internal watch battery) and I have been looking for a battery as well. I saw (on the web) where someone had attempted to use a similar sized SLA that was 1.3 AH instead of the original 1.6, but there was no followup on whether that had worked out. My current one has a connor 2024 in it (IDE 40 pin) and I was going to try out putting an adapter and SD card in to see if it would work, while I have it apart.

I assume that the instructions for setting up the new drive would follow this... http://support.radioshack.com/support_computer/doc1/1987.htm
 
This says that the drive supports both XT and AT modes, however the XT mode doesn't appear to be ATA-2 8-bit. Hence a CompactFlash card probably won't work (though it would be worth a go).
 
Conner drives in 1110hd

Conner drives in 1110hd

This says that the drive supports both XT and AT modes, however the XT mode doesn't appear to be ATA-2 8-bit. Hence a CompactFlash card probably won't work (though it would be worth a go).
Other drives work but height is an issue. I had a 40mb and 80mb Conner drives that I gave away after I realized the thing won't close with either new drive in it.
 
Totally correct about the CF card - its a no go, but I had to try - I wonder if there are pin issues or more than that. The adapter card has a small LED that come on when the drive is connected, but it doesn't light in the 1110. I can't get it to read the original (connor) drive either (it spins up and down). This one may be a floppy only machine for a while.
 
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U-Net II is an excellent, easy to use program for such a setup. It connects via parallel ports and if you have two parallel ports on the server you can print directly from the workstation.
 
Juror22 - did you have any luck finding a replacement floppy drive belt? I've chased options, but have not yet purchased anything...

Thanks,

Wesley
 
The best way to find information on these (or a replacement) is to look online for the "Matsushita EME-213" drive belts. They were used in synthesizers and the folks restoring those have a pretty active community as well. I think the first one that I got was marketed for the Matsushita in a synthesizer, but it fit and worked. I also saw someone reference that they had silicone belts for the panasonic version of this laptop, but I haven't been able to find those. Neither of my original floppy drives worked after installing the last belt that I bought, so I put a replacement floppy drive in, using an adapter cable that I built. As a result, I'm not sure I would recommend it (the belt) although the drives could both be bad.

I haven't been able to bring myself to disassemble the floppy drive on my working 1110 to test the belt and see if that is the issue or not.
 
I can't get it to read the original (connor) drive either (it spins up and down).
Hey everybody. It seems many years has passed, but I had the same problem with Tandy 1110HD and very Connor 2024. I managed to make it work with this hack
.

Basically it starts spinning but does not seek. The reason is that parking magnet became too strong for head to detach itself and start seeking. Because the magnet is covered with some kind of resin and with time it dissolved. So, with that resin disappearance the clearance between the head notch and parking magnet is too small so the head does not have much power to de-park. You need just open the drive up and create more clearance by using something like a tape. After making this trick mine started working (for how long -- I do not know). Still waiting for someone come up with HDD emulation options for those machines.
 
Hello all! (However many are in this Tandy 1110 HD forum, I'm unsure of, but nonetheless, hello!)

I'm new here, but I have been taking a look into trying to replace the hard drive in my Tandy 1110 HD. While you could get a replacement Conner drive every time your old one died, there's only so many of them left, and your wallet will be burning when you're done. I have an 2.5" IDE2SD converter I bought many years back. When I put it in and turn on the Tandy, I have to wait about two or three minutes before I get, "hard drive initialization failure; press any key to continue".

I have made some progress (I think) on the front that the interfaces are different. It seems that 2.5" IDE and Conner's 2.5" IDE are slightly different pinouts.

So let's get started!

2.5" IDE (Everything else):
Pin 21 - DMARQ (DMA Request)
Pin 27 - IORDY (I/O Ready)
Pin 29 - DMACK (DMA Acknowledge)

2.5" XTA (Conner Drives):
Pin 21 - Reserved (Something)
Pin 27 - DMACK (DMA Acknowledge)
Pin 29 - DMARQ (DMA Request)

There are some other pins there that differ, but they should not matter for our intentions. So if we splice the wires together (IDE Pin 21-XTA Pin 29, IDE Pin 27-XTA Pin 21, and IDE Pin 29-XTA Pin 27). After I did that, I put in the cable back in, minding the required new orientation of the cable, with the hard drive. I turned on the Tandy and noticed that instead of taking three minutes, it IMMEDIATELY gave me the aforementioned "hard drive initialization failure".

My new hypothesis is that the hard drive MUST have a capacity of 20 megabytes as seen in resource three below. We may be able to make a massive HPA on an SD card or CF card, or a 2.5" IDE hard drive, so the drives show up as 20 megabytes. Firstly, however, I will need to purchase a hard drive reader tomorrow. Anyways, hopefully I'm on the right scent to success, but we will see when we see!

~ Yours truly,
volatilememory

Resource One (2.5" IDE pinout): https://zwopi.blogspot.com/2012/07/igel-geht-fremd-sd-statt-cf.html
Resource Two (Conner CP2024 info): https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/conner/CP-2024AT-21MB-2-5-SSL-IDE-AT.html
Resource Three (20MB capacity): https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?t=22559&mobile=mobile
 
You are correct that it must be the 20MB Drive exactly or it will not work (it is the same issue for the other Tandy/Panasonics as well) and there was a member named leeb from a while back, who was able to get larger drives to work with a 'Drive Overlay' (whatever that was). I'm glad that you are looking into this and if you need anything, let me know, since I do have a bit more time and the ability to check things out a bit better than I could, a few years back.

I have been unable to bring an original Connor HD back to life with the 'fix' above, but I have one in my 1110 that (incredibly) still works.
 
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