Hi Rich! I did some testing of my
own tonight with the newly built Disk IO board and some IDE hard drives.
Most all of the drives were non-responsive to the N8VEM SBC. A couple of
them were partially responding to the CBIOS and came up with the same errors
you, Rolf, and Max are seeing. The directory is full of junk and is corrupted.
Then goes into BDOS R/O mode and hangs.
I have R1, R2, and R3 removed. I am
starting to wonder how I got this to work to begin with. Was I just lucky
that I picked just the right drive that worked right off the bat or did the
software evolve to reflect the characteristics of this particular Seagate
drive? There is something weird going on here. The Seagate drive
works reliably and at least as good as with the Disk IO prototype.
I wonder what the difference could be?
Thanks and have a nice day!
Andrew Lynch
From: n8...@googlegroups.com [mailto:n8...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Richard A. Cini
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009
9:25 PM
To: N8VEM-Post
Subject: [N8VEM: 2491] Disk-I/O --
Tonight's Testing Progress
All:
Here’s my book report from tonight:
* I lifted the legs of R1 – R3
closest to the IDE connector and connected the flying lead of R3 to Vcc rather
than ground, resulting
in a
pull-up on /DMACK rather than a pull-down. The other resistors were left
floating.
* Re-enabled the IDE_RESET code in the
monitor ROM.
With a drive connected, it doesn’t delay boot-up by much and I thought
that
not resetting the drive might have something to do with the issues we’re
experiencing.
* Tried the interface with four drives I
have handy: Toshiba MK1403MAV (2.5”), CF->IDE adapter plus 1gb CF
card, WD AC11200,
and a
Quantum Fireball (HP-issued 2.55gb).
Both the WD and the Quantum drives failed the TP-IDE
test. The CF adapter and the Toshiba drive almost work. They identify
themselves properly (ID string appears in the buffer in RAM), but when
attempting to use PIP, I get the same error as last night (“Cannot close
file...device R/O”).
I just noticed that the device it reports as having the
error is “=A:tp-ide.com”. I’m trying to PIP from the RAM
drive to the C: drive — this should work. After the transfer (even though
it fails), the directory entry on C: for the program that was to be transferred
is garbled but can be restored with a wildcard erase.
I just checked UPS and I expect to have the Seagate
drive that matches the prototype tomorrow so I’ll give it a whirl and see
what happens.
More tomorrow...
Rich
--
Rich Cini
Collector of Classic Computers
Build Master and lead engineer, Altair32 Emulator
http://www.altair32.com
http://www.classiccmp.org/cini