Hi,
I'm a vintage computer collector from Germany and new to this forum. Recently, I acquired some Apple II+/IIes and with them came a Xebec SASI host adapter and a huge hard disk. From browsing the web, I found that apparently Xebec sold kits consisting of the host adapter for an Apple II/II+/IIe plus an external controller PCB to turn a dumb MFM hard disk drive into a SASI HDD – at least I found a Xebec manual describing such a kit. Some German company probably called Rothahn seems to have used those kits together with a compartment and a huge full-height BASF 5 ¼” hard disk with whopping 21 MB to sell them as complete HDD stations for the Apple II – I even got a German manual for it.
Unfortunately, booting from this BASF HDD didn’t work out of the box so I have to assume that at least the data one that HDD might get corrupted over the last 40 year - or the drive is gone, although it still spins up. I’d like to try to revive the station by giving the BASF drive a low-level format or by replacing it with another working MFM drive (which I have) but I couldn’t find an image of the necessary Xebec utilities disk anywhere on the usual websites. According to the two manuals I have a disk version names “XEBEC Apple Pascal 1.1” for the Pascal OS as well as an equivalent utility disk version for DOS 3.3 and for CP/M 2.20B must have existed. If anyone out there would be able to provide images for one (or all at best) of those utility disks, I would be very happy indeed …
I'm a vintage computer collector from Germany and new to this forum. Recently, I acquired some Apple II+/IIes and with them came a Xebec SASI host adapter and a huge hard disk. From browsing the web, I found that apparently Xebec sold kits consisting of the host adapter for an Apple II/II+/IIe plus an external controller PCB to turn a dumb MFM hard disk drive into a SASI HDD – at least I found a Xebec manual describing such a kit. Some German company probably called Rothahn seems to have used those kits together with a compartment and a huge full-height BASF 5 ¼” hard disk with whopping 21 MB to sell them as complete HDD stations for the Apple II – I even got a German manual for it.
Unfortunately, booting from this BASF HDD didn’t work out of the box so I have to assume that at least the data one that HDD might get corrupted over the last 40 year - or the drive is gone, although it still spins up. I’d like to try to revive the station by giving the BASF drive a low-level format or by replacing it with another working MFM drive (which I have) but I couldn’t find an image of the necessary Xebec utilities disk anywhere on the usual websites. According to the two manuals I have a disk version names “XEBEC Apple Pascal 1.1” for the Pascal OS as well as an equivalent utility disk version for DOS 3.3 and for CP/M 2.20B must have existed. If anyone out there would be able to provide images for one (or all at best) of those utility disks, I would be very happy indeed …