[Coco] HDB-DOS error - HARD DRIVE NOT FOUND

[Mark Marlette]

Jim, 

The contacts in the TC^3 are GOLD plated, which helps a great deal on the oxidation, the contacts in the MPI are flashed. 

Oxidation can still occur due to dissimilar metals. As has been suggested. The contacts on the TC3 will appear BLACK. 

So as Gene said DO NOT SCRUB. I use a white soft eraser, this will clean them right up. 

Make sure to clean the ground tabs as well. So 44 pins of GOLD on the TC^3 or ANY Cloud-9 product that has a card edge, value-quality added . 

10 years gold vs 30 days for non gold based card(tin/lead) edge connections. If the gold is oxidized. Easy to clean. 

The TC^3 is a socketed CPLD, 84 PLCC type, with the proper tool ONLY, pull the chip, in a vertical fashion, wipe the pin contacts of the CPLD on a clean sheet of paper, IE: NO printing on the paper. So if any oxidation comes off on the paper. You will see vertical black lines on the paper. Any side to side movement while applying pressure to the CPLD will cause the pins to bend. Don't need to tell you this is a REALLY bad thing to have happen. So be careful. 

These are tin based leads with matching contacts in the socket. 

As the RTC is failing as well that indicates a global failure in the setup. Could be a failing HD but RTC would / should work as long as the correct driver was present on your backup floppy boot disk. 

You could try a simple poke. Now this is from memory and you could check the manual for the TC^3 and verify but you want to POKE from DECB the data register of your interface, IIRC, $FF74 (default) with the bit position of the SCSI ID. So SCSI ID 0 = 1, SCSI ID 1 = 2, etc.....Then POKE the strobe typically $FF75,1. The data is irrelevant, the WRITE to the reg causes the SCSI bus transaction to occur. Got to love SCSI, simplistic are FAST.. 

Sorry, not trying to be vague here, as this can be a complex issue, troubleshooting over Email is hard. Only a few hours of sleep, actually pasted out, due to other CoCo projects that are being completed, PS2 Keyboard Interface and a new SD card Interface with FATxx support. They both make one sleep ALOT less. 

So plug the SD into a FATxx based computer, copy files(.dsk ATM) to the device, install in CoCo and it reads the FATxx device. SD/SDHC support maybe even SDXC(?), over kill for the CoCo and I currently don't have a SDXC device. The CoCo could careless about the FATxx, it thinks it is a CoCo formatted device. All the work is performed in the SLAVE uC. Current RAW IO on my fastest SD card is 323KBs on the dev station. That is over x3 times the theoretical maximum of a CoCo. We are still testing this. Amazing what you still can learn AFTER all these years. We have had some VERY interesting data / benchmarking numbers during the development of Gary's SD interface and our SD card interface product spec. Things we never tested before in SuperDriver, amazing driver....Now we know EXACTLY what / how to make the fastest transfers possible. Thanks Gary for waking us up!!! 

There of course is some configuration issues that need to be worked out and this is NOT a product yet, but it is on the development system and becoming more capable each day. 

Sigh....need to get ready for my day job.....Wish the CoCo could be full time employment with great pay and benefits.... :) 

Regards, 

Mark 
http://www.cloud9tech.com 



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jim Hickle" <jlhickle at yahoo.com> 
To: coco at maltedmedia.com 
Sent: Monday, January 2, 2012 10:52:59 PM 
Subject: [Coco] HDB-DOS error - HARD DRIVE NOT FOUND 

Any ideas why HDB-DOS reports "HARD DRIVE NOT FOUND" though all drives work with NITROS9? 

TC^3 controller, disks are: 0 - hard drive, 5 - ZIP drive, 6 - CD-ROM 

HDB-DOS and this setup worked okay a couple years ago. Now it doesn't find either the hard or ZIP drives. I tried running wizard.bas from a new copy of the HDB-DOS disk. Still doesn't find drive, but now it gives me 15 seconds to choose to restart, boot os9 and something about drives 0 through 3. 

NITROS9 is working, but the weird thing is that at first it wouldn't boot, then things started working a bit at a time. This took place over about a week. 

- First didn't recognize any SCSI drive. 
- Then it would boot to the hard drive from a very few of my boot floppies, worked with the hard disk (/s0) but trying to access the others gave error 246 - NOT READY, and then /s0 also gave error 246. 
- Next /s5 and /sc6 could be accessed, but only if system was booted from the Superdriver disk. 
- Eventually all drives work and system boots from any of the boot floppies. 

Another odd thing is that only once did the system time get set from the clock in the TC^3. Every startup before and after put us back in January 1900. This evening it started setting the time, though I hadn't changed anything (including the floppy from which it booted). 


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