20 Dec
2013
20 Dec
'13
8:58 a.m.
Does anyone know exactly what was in the Lobo branded "SASI" external
hard
drive? I've managed to convince my Max-80 to talk
with a 10MB MFM drive
behind an Adaptec ACB-4000 bridge controller. It
formats and verifies
without a complaint, accepts bad sector information and creates a working
CP/M volume. But, for some reason I cannot get it to
boot from the hard
disk.
It won't be the end of the world if I have to cold-start from a floppy,
but my curiousity is getting the better of me. The utility that writes
the boot sectors works fine - there's a brief flicker of drive activity
and no error messages. When I set the DIP switches to cold-boot the hard
disk, I can see the busy LED on the bridge board light
up solid and the
machine freezes. Under normal I/O, the drive activity LED illuminates at
the same time as the one on the ACB-4000, but at boot
I never see the
drive itself respond.
I'm assuming that there's some incompatibility between the ACB-4000 and
the boot PROM. It would help to know what it's expecting to see. I've
been digging through the boot ROM sources, but nothing jumps out so far.
FWIW, I've tried an Adaptec ACB-5500 controller (same results), a Xebec
1410 (won't format or verify, but can be written/read) and a Xebec 1410A
(I/O errors).
Steve
Steve,
What OS are you using? I understand that the original OS had an OS bug
related to direct hard drive booting. I can check around if you have not
yet resolved the problem
Bill