From: Josh Dersch <derschjo at msu.edu>
Hi all --
Recently picked up a TRS-80 "Eight Meg Disk System" (model 26-4151) and the
associated interface board, with the intent of hooking this up to my TRS-80
Model 16.
On further investigation, it appears that the 26-4151 is a Secondary drive,
which makes me curious as to whether this effort is going to be ultimately
fruitless. So, without further ado, here's the questions I have:
1. Is it possible to get this secondary drive working as a primary, or am I
up a creek without having a primary drive (or extra magic hardware in the
drive I have.)
2. If I can work around #1, I need to know the pinouts of the drive and the
controller board since I do not have a cable to connect the two. The
controller has a 50-pin edge connector and the drive has three connectors
-- 2 50-pin (labeled "Control") and one 20-pin (labeled "Data").
Hi
It sounds like you have a mismatch of things. It sounds like you have
the interface board for the 5 Meg drive and the 8 Meg drive that
has the controller in the trs-80. The 5 Meg came with the controller
in the drive board ( although, I've seen some indication that some
of the 8Meg drives did this as well ). The newer large drive had
the controller in the trs-80 box and required the two ribbon cables
of 50 and 20 pins.
It can be made to work with either a controller board from a 5 Meg
or a wd1001 board. Both have been on ebay resently but I only
see then every couple of months. Of course one can get the
controller board that mounts in the trs-80.
The wd1001 will require a little additional circuit to do address
decoding.
The controller went for a 'buy it now' but was the second time it
was listed.
Just to make sure, open up your drive box. If all that is in there
is a power supply and drive, then you'll most likely need to find one
of the controller boards. If it has a large board, then one of the 50
pin connectors was to be connected to the interface. You should
look.
a. And as a follow on to #2, where would you
suggest getting the parts
and tools necessary to build the aforementioned cable? I've never
constructed such a cable, and I'll have need to do so again in the future
(need to assemble some long-ish ESDI cables for my PDP 11/73...)
Although, I currently have a crimper tool for these connectors,
I've had good success with a vice and a couple strips of metal.
With either method, one can still mess them up. One needs
to make sure the ribbon is well aligned before the final squeeze.
Dwight
Thanks for any suggestions,
Josh
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