3 Feb
2014
3 Feb
'14
6:34 a.m.
On 02/02/2014 05:38 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
So, I've got a "Laser XT" clone which I hauled out of a dumpster a few
days
ago, and which has a Seagate ST-11R controller and ST225R drive inside.
Upon booting, the controller (BIOS v1.7) detects that there's a drive
present, then displays:
"Drive 1 is not initialized. Run BIOS install routine for the drive (y/n)?"
Pressing 'y' results in 'yes' appearing on the screen, but then nothing
at
all happening - no drive noises, no drive LED activity, no progress updates
on screen. Although I might expect it to take quite a while to format, I'd
expect some signs of life (and in fact I'm surprised it doesn't prompt for
a defect table before doing anything else)
Pressing 'n' does nothing at all, despite my expecting it to print 'no'
on
the screen and then immediately attempt a floppy boot.
Well, now I feel like an idiot. The 'n' key on the keyboard had stopped
working (along with a small handful of others - I've traced things back to
an LS138 IC on the PCB which appears to have a faulty output) :-)
I suspect that the drive is fubar
Turns out that it seems to format OK via debug, so I'm not sure what was
(apparently) hanging the BIOS code. I say "seems to" because I suppose it's
too early to tell if it'll stay running for long. I've put DOS on there;
next task is to find a 'park' utility and probably get some comms software
so I can transfer stuff via RS232 rather than shunt floppies back and forth.
cheers
Jules