Victor 9k / Sirius 1 Software

[1302L]

Thanks Paul! This wouldn't have been feasible without your kind help and your extensive file library on the archive.

Today I disassembled the Keyboard and it seems, beside the issue with worn pads, this thing was made to last forever, great engineering!
Regarding the pads, not one had the full capacitive coating anymore, so no wonder, the keyboard wasn't working at all.

Gave it a thorough cleanup and now I am waiting for the new pads to arrive, to be continued.

Best,

Martin.

 

[pdevine]

My keyboards were in similar shape before I replaced the key pads. Slightly more than half the keys were working for me. After replacing the pads all work fine. They are built like tanks.

 

[1302L]

Hi,
today I managed to realize a complete boot cycle with an interim workaround for the keyboard to overrun the date request on startup
The Victor booted nicely on MS-Dos 2.11 and even 'playing Talking StarTek' was possible.

The floppy drive works well most of the time, sometimes I had to boot twice.

As the Victor has a built in HDD with 20MB I wanted to see if this works as well. I was able to gain access to the HDD on drive A:, but displaying the files there by dir/w was complicated, I've got error messages, but retrying brought the files on the screen. Running files didn't work, as well as using the Hard Disk Tool Kit on the HDD. I will post Pictures of the Error messages.

A second Issue, regardless which disk image I take, the Victor won't boot on CP-M, what might be the cause here? I am getting Error 05 and 04 on the little Start screen with the disk symbol.

General question: I have used MD- 2HD Disks to create the boot and the other disks, the Victor won't even format the DS.DD Disks, the HD Disks had been written with 360rpm, what are your opinions here?


Thanks and best regards,

Martin.

 

[pdevine]

Hi,
today I managed to realize a complete boot cycle with an interim workaround for the keyboard to overrun the date request on startup
The Victor booted nicely on MS-Dos 2.11 and even 'playing Talking StarTek' was possible.

The floppy drive works well most of the time, sometimes I had to boot twice.

As the Victor has a built in HDD with 20MB I wanted to see if this works as well. I was able to gain access to the HDD on drive A:, but displaying the files there by dir/w was complicated, I've got error messages, but retrying brought the files on the screen. Running files didn't work, as well as using the Hard Disk Tool Kit on the HDD. I will post Pictures of the Error messages.

A second Issue, regardless which disk image I take, the Victor won't boot on CP-M, what might be the cause here? I am getting Error 05 and 04 on the little Start screen with the disk symbol.

General question: I have used MD- 2HD Disks to create the boot and the other disks, the Victor won't even format the DS.DD Disks, the HD Disks had been written with 360rpm, what are your opinions here?


Thanks and best regards,

Martin.

Hi Martin,
Glad you've made some progress. If you're comfortable with it, I'd recommend cleaning the hard drives heads with isopropyl alcohol. Be very careful with the top head as it's mounted on springs that are very easy to dislodge. That will likely help with your booting issues. Otherwise, if you have access to a floppy cleaning diskette, that would work as well.

In terms of the boot errors the numbers correspond with what went wrong. A 4 or 5 error basically means the computer had a hard time reading the disk.
Bootrom error codes
01- No sync pulse detected
02- No header track
03- Checksum error in header
04- Not right track
05- Not right sector
06- Not a data block
07- Data checksum error
08- Sync too long
99- Not a system disk

When booting a hard drive system into CP/M, it's typical that at the end of the boot you get an error message. If you hit control-c at that stage you'll exit out of the error and be fully booted. That happens because the CP/M boot loader expects the disk to be in drive A, and on a system with a hard drive the hard drive is loaded as A and the floppy drive becomes drive B. But what I'm talking about happens after the point where you're getting an error 4 or 5. I think that likely your machine is having trouble reading the disks.

In terms of DS DD vs DS HD disks, in theory your victor should only work with the Double Density disks. The high density ones use a different media and they're not supposed to be compatible. In practice I've regularly gotten away with using HD disks, though the experts tell me even if they work for a little while the disk will slowly disappear due to the incompatibility between the media and the strength of the magnetic signal used. In the past I've written disks with a fluxengine and then immediately made a fresh copy on my victor using the disk copy program just to eliminate any subtle incompatibilities that the fluxengine might have created. I haven't had any issues with the fluxengine disks, but I also know it's a reverse engineering of what the victor is doing so why not let the original do its thing.

Best,
Paul

 

[westveld]

I'd recommend cleaning the hard drives heads with isopropyl alcohol. Be very careful with the top head as it's mounted on springs that are very easy to dislodge. That will likely help with your booting issues.

I'm pretty sure he means clean the FLOPPY drive heads, not the hard drive heads

 

[1302L]

Thanks Paul and westveld,

Thanks for the advices!

I will try to clean the floppy drive heads and post the HDD Errors.

Regarding the DS DD disks: I was able to write the image with the GW on it, but none of these disks were accepted by the Victor. As I have bought them used, maybe the disks are faulty in some way. Nevertheless, the DS HD Disks were new and originally sealed, no problems with these, let's hope that the magnetic information stays a while on them, otherwise I can make a fresh image copy with the GW. I will try to purchase some other DS DD Disks, any European source hint for these?

According to 'Binarydinosaurs' there was an HD Floppy Disk Unit in the later Victors / Siriuses: https://binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Apricot/sirius1.php
Mine is a late 1983 model, might it be that this machine has the DSHD Floppy drive mentioned?

Best,

Martin.

 

[pdevine]

I'm pretty sure he means clean the FLOPPY drive heads, not the hard drive heads

Thanks @westveld, most definitely! Typing too fast.

 

[pdevine]

Thanks Paul and westveld,

Thanks for the advices!

I will try to clean the floppy drive heads and post the HDD Errors.

Regarding the DS DD disks: I was able to write the image with the GW on it, but none of these disks were accepted by the Victor. As I have bought them used, maybe the disks are faulty in some way. Nevertheless, the DS HD Disks were new and originally sealed, no problems with these, let's hope that the magnetic information stays a while on them, otherwise I can make a fresh image copy with the GW. I will try to purchase some other DS DD Disks, any European source hint for these?

According to 'Binarydinosaurs' there was an HD Floppy Disk Unit in the later Victors / Siriuses: https://binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Apricot/sirius1.php
Mine is a late 1983 model, might it be that this machine has the DSHD Floppy drive mentioned?

Best,

Martin.

Hi Martin,
Sorry no advice on European floppy disks; I've done all my purchasing in the US.

I hadn't heard there was a HD version of the drives, that's new to me. I've never seen one of those models.

Let us know how it goes!

 

[1302L]

Hi,
last night I attempted to run the HD Utilities once more in order to get some pictures.

HDSETUP didn't let me initiate disk '0' as it is labeled as the boot HDD

HDFIXUP gave me the Error Messages displayed in the pictures 'Bad master drive label: uninitialized or unknown Revision', I should contact the service center.
- Am I using the right programs?

Booting up with CP/M gave me the error message described by Paul, unfortunately I couldn't make it disappear by hitting Enter.

Any advice on these topics? BTW: I have to adjust the Screen!

Thanks and best regards,

Martin.

 

[pdevine]

Hi,
last night I attempted to run the HD Utilities once more in order to get some pictures.

HDSETUP didn't let me initiate disk '0' as it is labeled as the boot HDD

HDFIXUP gave me the Error Messages displayed in the pictures 'Bad master drive label: uninitialized or unknown Revision', I should contact the service center.
- Am I using the right programs?

Booting up with CP/M gave me the error message described by Paul, unfortunately I couldn't make it disappear by hitting Enter.

Any advice on these topics? BTW: I have to adjust the Screen!

Thanks and best regards,

Martin.

Booting with CP/M on a machine with a Hard drive, that error is expected. You hit alt-c to get out of it. Then you should be in CP/M as normal, the floppy drive is drive b:.

In terms of the HD utilities, that does look like the error indicates it's been formatted by a later version. I just uploaded a bunch of new versions to the archive, and at this point I'm not sure myself which is the latest one. Are you trying to recover what's on the drive? If you don't care about what's on the drive I'd use factoryF, which does a low-level reformat and should route around any bad sectors. Then you can setup new partitions with HDsetup afterwards.

What happens when you boot the machine? Does it boot from the HD? Or do you have to boot from a floppy? At that point can you see the HD at all after booting? I'm wondering if you just need to copy MS-DOS back over on the HD. The normal sequence to start from scratch:
1) Low level format with factoryF --this will delete all existing data
2) configure partitions with HDSETUP
3) reboot the machine and use sys to copy the operating system onto the boot partition.

If you want to recover what's already on the drive, I've usually done that using an MFM emulator rather than trying to do it inside DOS. You can potentially do it inside DOS but if the drive is in a bad state that might be challenging.

 

[1302L]

Hi Paul,

thanks again.

I've made a diskette with factoryF, and booted the V9 from this disk

Executing factoryf, It gave me the error: 'Address mark not found', please see pictures attached, I also ran HDASSY and HDOK which haven't brought me further as well.

Booting a DOS 2.11 (Brad's HD DOS) I am able to access Drive A: to the Prompt, sometimes I am able to run DIR, as it seems, there is a Version of DOS 2.11 on the Disk. On startup the V9 tries to boot from Floppy at first, if no Floppy is inserted, it tries to access the HDD, HDD Symbol comes on and a second later HDD Error 98 is displayed.Inserting a Floppy afterwards, it boots fine from the Floppy.
Tried to copy files from Floppy to HDD which didn't work as well.

Thanks also for the CP/M - Hint, this worked very well and I was able to start up i.e. 'Spacewar'.

I repaired the Keyboard as well, works very good now.

Best, Martin.

 

[westveld]

According to 'Binarydinosaurs' there was an HD Floppy Disk Unit in the later Victors / Siriuses: https://binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Apricot/sirius1.php
Mine is a late 1983 model, might it be that this machine has the DSHD Floppy drive mentioned?

Martin,

It would be interesting to document this if you do have a drive meant for HD media.

Could you post model #s of the drive(s) - may need to slide them out - on mine each drive has a screw on the bottom and side.
One of mine has Tandon TM100-4 floppy drives. I'll have to check the others

 

[1302L]

Hi,
will gladly do so, as I wanted to clean the heads of the Floppy drive as well. In the course of doing this I will check the connections for the HDD, maybe it is just a trifle that lets the HDD fail.
Best, Martin.

 

[Gary C]

No Probs. I'll drop off a set of disks anyway along with the spare disk controller which I know works. Hopefully that will help rule out a hardware problem with the machine and potentially fix it if there is a fault

Cheers,
Dave

Nice to meet you today.

WOuld be great if you can get the Sirius working again.

 

[pdevine]

Martin,

It would be interesting to document this if you do have a drive meant for HD media.

Could you post model #s of the drive(s) - may need to slide them out - on mine each drive has a screw on the bottom and side.
One of mine has Tandon TM100-4 floppy drives. I'll have to check the others

Everyone I've seen myself is a TM100-4, although they're not using the standard TM100 control board. I'd be very interested if it's a different model.

 

[Moonferret]

Nice to meet you today.

WOuld be great if you can get the Sirius working again.

Yes, great to meet you too! Well, as we expected the floppy drive was also faulty along with the controller. Good news is that it's all working fine now after swapping in the spares. DMA card also checks out good! I'm passing by the museum at some point next weekend so will drop it back off then.

Cheers,
Dave

 

[Gary C]

Fantastic news. Cheers. I can try the xebec card now

 

[1302L]

This is great news, another Victor up and running!

 

[1302L]

Everyone I've seen myself is a TM100-4, although they're not using the standard TM100 control board. I'd be very interested if it's a different model.

Hi,

As soon as I'll find a little bit more time I am going to disassemble the Victor and post pictures of the floppy drive as well as the HDD.
On Friday I tried some other other new DSDD disks, the Victor didn't like these as well, bringing the DSDD Disk content to a DSHD Disk, the Victor immediately booted.

Getting back to the HDD issue, I tried SHOWSTAT from the HD field service Disk today, it gave some detailed information about the disk, please see pictures attached, any comment on this, as well as my last post about the HDD is highly appreciated, also for the disassembly of the machine, what to look for especially.

Thanks and best regards,

Martin.

 

[Gary C]

Yes, great to meet you too! Well, as we expected the floppy drive was also faulty along with the controller. Good news is that it's all working fine now after swapping in the spares. DMA card also checks out good! I'm passing by the museum at some point next weekend so will drop it back off then.

Cheers,
Dave

I am in on Saturday.