• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Tandy 1000 TX HD not working...

J

jcniest5

Member
Joined
Nov 19, 2006
Messages
26
Location
The Twin Cities, MN.
So, been awhile and when I turned on the TX, it keeps asking for a floppy disk. Upon boot up, I do a DIR C: and no HD is found. Use FDISK and it cannot find my HD at all. The HD is the original one (I believe) on a card that plugs into a slot. Don't remember if I did anything to it the last time I used. I remember it was working then. I can't even hear the HD spin up now. Is it dead? What kind of HD can I replace it with? Can I grab an old IDE (assuming I can grab an 8-bit IDE Floppy/HD controller) for it?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.
 
Great Hierophant said:
I bet the the drive was a 20MB Tandy Hard Card, which used an MFM drive, so you cannot use an IDE drive with it. I had one myself which failed. Who don't you try a low level format, the drive uses a common Western Digital controller: http://artofhacking.com/th99/c/U-Z/20217.htm
Click to expand...

How would I do the low level format? From the BIOS? Don't even know how to get into the BIOS anymore. I think there was a disk of some sort. I lost track of everything.
 
At the time of the TX, Tandy was offering two different hard drives. If you're lucky you'll have what is described above. However they were shipping a lot of what they called "smart drives". These were 8bit IDE drives. Very hard to find replacements and no low level format.

Check your cable. If it has a single 40 pin cable it is one of these. If it has a 20 and a 34 pin cable then it is what is described above.
 
I have the 40Mb version in my TX which has the 8-bit IDE hard drive on it. The drive died and I replaced it with a Seagate ST-351A/X (there are some on fee-pay at the moment, ranging in price from $44.99 to nearly $200!) and it "sort of" worked when jumpered as an XT drive it would low-level format to about 25Mb or so... for what I needed it to do it worked fine.

On the plus side you do pick up some speed on the old TX because the ST-351A/X is much faster hard drive than the old WD 3028 or whatever it was that was there.

Hope this helps,

Ian.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top