Lawrence Walker wrote:
There is a circular hole, but it accesses the
drive locking
(parking) mechanism. It seems to be like SCSI with 2 50-pin
A B Control sockets and 3 A B C 20 pin Data sockets . I have a
50-pin line terminator pack for it. The drives have a label saying "
this unit contains a line terminator " Haven't opened them up yet.
On the front panel a lock-key turns power on or off. I' ve only one
key but it seems to work with all 3. It has 2 buttons one labelled
Protect and one labelled Active. Possibly illuminated (haven't fired
them up yet.)
Those are 8.4MB drives. Not SCSI, not even ST-506. Those are 8"
Shugart mechanisms in there, 4 heads by 256 cylinders. I forget
how termination worked in those units (haven't seen one in action
in at least 12 years). And yes, the write protect switch and the
active light are illuminated when in use. The number of times I've
wished I had a hardware write-protect switch on a PC...
When the drives are in use and the active light is blinking, those
drives make the friendliest little chirping noise.
The II itself has a cage for 8 cards occupied by
5 cards, card 1 has
cables leading to 2 female DB25 "serial port A B' ,card 2 has a
cable to the int. fdd and one to a M 34-pin parallel printer port,
card 3 is for the ext. hdd , the like-new card 4 has no cables looks
like a memory card and card 5 is hard-wired to the CRT board.
Do you know whether it had some sort of fdd select jumpers ?
I'll switch cables and see if it will boot off the ext. fdd.
Quite a few were sold, which became a serious problem a couple of years
later when most of them were dropping like flies. Tandy's parts
contract with Shugart was one of the worst deals they ever made. At
least the 5/12/15/35/70 MB drives were standard Tandon units and if
need be could be replaced with other vendors' drives, assuming a slight
change to connect the drive logic to the write-protect switch.
Well I finally fired up the HDDs and they appear to be functioning.
BUT , there seems to be no data cable pins on the M.II itself. It
seems strange since there is the ext. connector built in to the
chassis for the control cable. I checked out the HDD controller card
and there was nada nor could I see any 20 pin connectors anyplace
else. Were the data sockets only for sharing data between the HDDs ?
ciao larry
lwalkerN0spaM(a)interlog.com