Epson QX-10 hard drive

[Warner Losh]

On Mon, Feb 1, 2021 at 7:15 AM Jules Richardson via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> On 1/31/21 12:35 PM, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote:
> > Greetings
> >
> > I recently purchased a QCS external hard disk on ebay. This was one of
> the
> > companies that was selling DEC Rainbow hard drives. I had hoped it was an
> > old Rainbow drive with interesting to me bits... Turns out it is an Epson
> > QX-10 hard drive, full of interesting to bits for the QX-10 CP/M
> > enthusiast. I've had trouble finding a suitable community to note this in
> > should there be people around that care... so I thought I'd ask here is
> > people know of good CP/M groups and/or QX-10/16 groups, mailing lists,
> irc
> > channels, discord servers, etc I could find.
>
> I'm not aware of anything, unfortunately. I've got a QX-10 that was
> originally one of Epson's sales demo machines, and got taken around to
> prospective customers by one of their sales reps - which does mean that it
> was well looked after and came with a *lot* of documentation (and media,
> but nothing "exciting" beyond the usual OS, Valdocs etc.).
>
> Did you happen to take an image of the drive contents?
>

Yes. I do. It looks to be CP/M format, with 3 maybe 4 partitions. I've had
a couple of requests, so I uploaded it to

https://people.freebsd.org/~imp/qx-10-disk.img

Raw sector dump, in physical order, of all the tracks. 4 heads, 16 sectors
per track, 480 cylinders. Cylinder 480 and higher could be read, but were
in a different format, so all bets are off as to what's there in this dump.
The SASI to MFM adapter is a WD1002, but it wasn't in the loop when I
imaged things. Can't talk SASI at the moment anyway, so there's no extra
data I could glean from that, at least in a quick pass over the WD1002 docs.


> (hanging a hard disk off mine would be fun, but I think they were SASI to
> the external enclosure, and there was a SASI interface which plugged into
> the expansion slots - I'm not sure if the latter is documented anywhere)
>

Yes, the unit I got was an external unit sold by QCS, which sold units for
Apple, TRS-80, IBM PC, DEC Rainbow, Expson QX-10 and a few others I'm sure
I've forgotten. It has the SASI to MFM adapter card connected to the
mini-scribe disk. I got it mostly for playing with Rainbow stuff, but it
doesn't have to wind up there...

Warner