According to my H89 manual, it takes 10 sector disks. I have had my H89 for a while, but I haven't been able to locate any software for it yet. I bought it at a hamfest and the person that sold it to me claims to have the software and that they will send it to me, but I'm not holding my breath... --tom At 01:09 PM 4/1/2003 +0000, you wrote:

Tom, Tony, et al, Maybe I can be of some help to a few people here. I have a recently-acquired soft sector controller and some other spare parts. I have no idea if the soft sectored controller works, because I just got it and have yet to plug it in. All of the software I do have is hard-sector HDOS... no CP/M whatsoever. I thought I had it, but apparently I don't, unless I missed a box. I have already contacted Don Maslin off list to request a soft-sectored Magnolia CP/M boot disk, and check my thinking here... it should be possible to create a bootable hard sector disk from the bootable soft sectored one by installing both controllers. Unless I'm missing something, that seems like a no-brainer. If that is in fact possible, I will be happy to share the benefits of that (small) labor with those in need. One unfortunate rub since my earlier discussion in this thread with Tony... last night I pulled my reference machine out of storage and powered it up, and it almost boots. Almost. A working machine went into storage six months ago, but what has emerged seems to take a (hard sector) disk read error on every modulo-10 numbered sector starting at 40 (that's sector, not track), with any diskette I use. No problem with any other sectors, just 40, 50, 60, etc. I have to diag and solve this problem first, obviously. Disk rotation speed is good (between 177 and 200), so any pointers any of you may have may help me save time dinking around. I have both spare drives and controllers, but all are in unknown states at this point. Timing wise, once that's fixed, I will need to have received the disk from Don, and see if the soft-sectored controller is working at all, and diagnose THAT if not. And THEN we'll be in business. For those of you who would like either the bootable HDOS (hard sector) or the bootable CP/M (hard sector) when this gets sorted out, please reply to me OFF LIST. I'm hoping the hard sector drive problem is trivial. I also found a bootable/standalone HDOS diskette with a comm program on it, so those that don't specifically need CP/M could use this, if you like. Ideas on the disk issue? Patrick

Well, as it turned out, the stepper motor on the drive was locking up. The further towards the inner tracks it got, the more it struggled, and it wasn't close to correctly centering over any track beyond the first few. I'll mess with that later. I was able to replace the drive with a spare, and I'm again up and running. I produced several good test boot disks, BUT, I don't know how well that new drive is aligned, it's straight off the shelf the internal diag, but I don't have a 5.25" alignment disk to check it otherwise. Anyone who receives a boot disk from me is, therefore, going to be my "canary in the mine." :-) Next task... get the soft-sectored controller running. Unfortunately I have no docs for this whatsoever, not even a schematic. I understand that it requires MTR-90, and possibly a certain HDOS software distribution as well. Does anyone know? Patrick

MTR-90 is in the ROM on the 89's CPU board. My MTR-90 manual indicates that DIP switch SW501, located on the lower right of the CPU logic circuit board (consisting of eight jumpers, 0-7) should be set as follows: Jumpers 0 and 1 (port 07CH [174Q]) 00 Hard Sectored 5.25 disk 01 H/Z-47 10 H/Z-67 hard disk/floppy 11 No device Jumpers 2 and 3 (port 078H [170Q]) 00 Soft sectored 5.25 disk 01 H/Z-47 10 H/Z-67 Winchester disk/floppy 11 No device Jumper 4 0 Primary boot from 07CH 1 Primary boot from 078H It certainly seems as if you can run both controllers in one machine. I have the manual for the Z-89-37 double-density disk controller, which is the one I believe you need. I also have manuals for the H-17-1 (48 TPI) and H-17-5 (96 TPI) FDDs. They're all short so let me know what you need. The controller manual says that you need either HDOS version 2.0 (with update HOS-5-UP) or CP/M version 2.2.03 or higher. -W

[...] You most certainly can. My Z90 (essentially the same machine -- AFAIK the differences are that it came fully assembled ('Z', not 'H'), and came with 64K RAM, has MTR-90, the hard sector controller and the double-density soft sector controller. The former is cabled to the single built-in drive, the latter to an external drive box. It will boot either HDOS or CP/M, and can use both types of disks -tony