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#21
@Bree , @Berton and others -
Thought y'all might like this:
The 8-Bit Guy - The 8-Bit Guy's Website
YouTube
Cheers!
Don't faint - I have a 10 MB HDD that I would like to get into, lol!
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Posts : 5,048 Windows 10/11 Pro x64, Various Linux Builds, Networking, Storage, Cybersecurity Specialty. Thread Starter
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New #22
I had one MFM hard drive with 20MB capacity connected to Atari 520ST connected by some board to Atari game port. Instantly made few hundred of 720 floppies obsolete. Put another one later on. 40MB was huge at that time. At about same time I got one of first data CD players and mounted all of that in desktop PC case so Atari itself became just a keyboard.
I still have one old IBM keyboard, one with at/XT switch but it's not usable with modern systems because it's controller is actually a Motorola sound chip. PS/2 KBs work fine.
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New #23
(Acknowledged that this represents post exhumation)
CM (Compumind)... how did you make out so far? You've probably discovered by now that just applying power may not be enough to make the drive spin up; you may need to send it a "Spindle Motor On" command. I have an MFM hard drive (32MB) on my lap right now that refuses to spin up until it's received that command. You've probably also discovered by now that the chances of the onboard electronics surviving this long (about 35 years now) are exceedingly slim. If you lucked out and still have good electronics (! ! !), then you can build an interface to the drive with an Arduino (I suggest a Mega2560 for its large GPIO count); drives that old had a low enough data transfer rate that - if you really pay a lot of attention to your Arduino code - you can get the SBC to talk to the drive enough to read/write one sector at a time. You can even scavenge a great deal of interface code from Arduino's SD Card library to get file system protocols, partitioning, FAT, et cetera.
Fun project.
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