[Coco] SCSI/SASI HD interfaces...

[Stephen H. Fischer]

I had to drive over the hill towards Santa Cruz to get Seagate to load the firmware onto a HD I purchased that supported 256 byte sectors. The firmware on the drive did not. 

The drive finally failed after many hard hits to get it to spin. 

When I opened it up one of the heads was trailing the arm connected with just one wire. 

I visited one electronic surplus store just after more SCSI drives that this community could ever use were thrown away. 120 MB ones I remember. 

Before the CoCo 2 I got FLEX09 working on a SYM-1 with two (2) defective floppy drives. (What is apparently wrong with that statement) 

After ~ 10 days I finally took then back and said they would not work. 

The person got on the phone to LA and almost shouted that he had a customer that needed working drives. 

Two days later I got the new ones and the FLEX09 raw boot disk worked the first time. 

SHF

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "George Ramsower" <georgera at gvtc.com>
To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2015 8:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] SCSI/SASI HD interfaces...


>  All this talk of early hard drives reminds me of when I got my first 
> hard drive for a coco.
>  This was before the internet and BBS was king. I found a SCSI 
> interface for my coco and then looked for a hard drive on the BBS. I did 
> find one fellow that had two, five meg units for sale. I contacted him 
> and we discussed this. He told me I needed an MFM controller to connect 
> to my SCSI interface in order to control these two hard drives.
>  So.... I hunted for and found .... I think it was an Adaptek 
> controller.. or something like that, which would adapt my SCSI 
> controller to the MFM drives. This all took me a few weeks to accomplish.
>  Once I had it all together, I was able to format one of the two drives 
> that guy sold me but the other one, I never could get to work. Hmm
>  Finally I took it apart and found the patter was destroyed. I was 
> ripped off!!!
>  Who ya gonna complain to? There was no eBay or Amazon back then.
>  Then, the one that did work failed. I reformatted it and used it some 
> more.. a few days.... and it failed again.
>  I reformatted it again and it work a few more days and failed again. 
> Finally, I gave up and called the drive purchase a failure.
>  Finally, I did find a used SCSI drive and added that to the system. 
> Eventually, the MFM drive did fail and then it was down to the SCSI 
> drive. Been using them ever since. I've since replaced the coco and hard 
> drives several times. Now I need to find another monitor as my old one died.
>  I'm thinking of the RGB to VGA adapter so I can get a cheap VGA 
> monitor to work on that 'puter. so I can still use it.
>  Darn, this is fun!!
>