Emulator II+ HD trouble with hard disk

[mocheez]

Hi everybody! I'm pretty new to this forum and the Emulator in general. I just got an Emulator II+ HD that was supposedly serviced and working but the hard drive is not working. The front led flashes in a regular sequence (like on-on-on-strobe) but the drive doesn't seem to spin or whatever. Whenever I invoke the disk+2 command, the Emulator II says : "No 2nd drive". So I thought I'd open it and see if something looks wrong. And it does look wrong! I have this huge Adaptec board connected to a smaller SCSI board that says "Easy to be hard" and which holds a Zilog chip… with a bent leg laying outside the socket. I suppose it wasn't meant to be inserted that way.

[dr.c]

Did you try to contact the people to whom you bought it ?

[mocheez]

Well, actually we both knew the hard drive had failed, just before I bought it. Previous owner told me it was said to be working by the people who made the maintenance (the best audio repair shop in France), but that it had failed when he booted the EII. That was just a few days before I bought it. As the main floppy drive was still working and I knew I would have to go with a HXC floppy emulator someday, I didn't really care. Those old drives are dying, that's their fate, anyway.
But I thought maybe the hard disk was ok and that something was missing inside, like a loose connection, or else. So far, every cable looked ok and connected properly.
I couldn't find any explanation for the led sequence on the hard drive's front panel. Looks like some kind of repetitive "code", just like morse code.
The thing is, the hard disk is not starting at all. No spinning, no strange noises, nothing. The Adaptec board inside the EII has a red led that flashes once when I turn the sampler on, then nothing happens (hard drive wise) except the led flashing on the front panel.
I thought I'd contact the place where the EII has been serviced but they probably won't remember and it's hard to diagnose on the phone without having the actual machine in front of you. Still, it's strange to find a bent chip leg on the scsi board of a hard drive that's been said to be ok by one of the best audio repair shops on this earth… Just saying.

[mocheez]

I ended up accidentally booting a 3.0 HD OS floppy (I didn't even know I had one…) and I had access to Hard Drive options in the Special Menu. So far, the drive is not seen either but rather than the previous "No 2nd drive" message, I have "Drive not ready" instead. So I might open the EII once more and check every cable and socket connection. I wish someone could translate that blinking hard drive led morse code for me. I'm sure it means something precise and that this blinking message comes from the SCSI board and not the drive itself.

Video of the led :
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pg6knr9to4lau9z/EII_HD.mp4?dl=0

[seamonkey]

Would it be possible for you to downsize the size of the included photo?
It enlarges the entire thread so large, it's like as big as a house.
I have to use the bar at the bottom to scroll over to read the text.

[mocheez]

Oh yeah, sorry about that! I have a few more details about my EII+ HD : it has boot rom E2+ HHDM 2.5 and Scanner 2.1 rom.
Hard drive is the famous Miniscribe model 8425 from 1986. I checked every cable connection, it doesn't fire up. The Adaptec card has its led lit during the startup process and it turns off when the Emulator switches to floppy boot. The hard drive is absent and SCSI tests show errors.

[midipuppies]

It sounds like the system is just telling you that the HD is not responding. If you can boot the system from floppy, I doubt there's anything more to it, except the bent pin on the SCSI controller.

The only other thing I can think of besides a loose connection, is insufficient power reaching the hard disk. To rule that out, check voltage at the disk Molex connector.

As for the bent pin.. shit happens sometimes. I would straighten it and re-seat it. Nothing on the SCSI bus will work as intended with an IC seated incorrectly.

If you are wanting to go HxC anyway, you can downgrade the system to non-HD status as a few of us have done in the past.

[Paula]

So, Am I right in assuming that even with the HD model I should be able to boot from floppy without a hard disk?

I ask because I have an EII+ HD that has a dead hard disk (different blinky pattern) but you can see the motors are rusted.
the FDD is ALSO rusted.
So I've put an HxC drive in, with an SDCard with EII disk images and the HxC doesn't seem to be flashing or beeping and the track/sector display still shows 00.
I assumed this was because it was trying to boot from a HDD that is dead.

Paula

[mocheez]

I'm still stuck with my HD problem and I'm finally starting to accept its death.

Now…

Let's say I want to keep my "legacy" floppy drive inside my EII+HD and remove the dead hard drive. Can I put the HxC drive as drive #2 or should it be drive #1 (any jumper settings to change?) What are the different configurations available and their respective advantages?

2) Do I have to remove the Adaptec and SCSI cards and move any Eprom's from them, back to the main board? If yes, which are the ones that are concerned and where do they go? Or do I need new eproms?

I'm sorry I have to sound so precise and demanding but every post I read on the subject gets me even more lost every time… Information is all over the place but hard to gather in a single one ;-)

Thanks to anyone willing to shed some light.

[alka]

Hopefully Paula above can comment as I believe she just figured all this out on an HD EII

[mocheez]

Yeah, I got in touch with Paula and she's been very helpul already. I was just wondering if a Main ROM 2.1 + Scanner Rom 3.1 kit from eBay was ok to downgrade my EII+HD to a regular EII+…

[dfiorucci]

You might want to take a look at Drem to replace the hard drive since you have the Adaptec A400 SCSI card.
It's a hard drive emulator which will work with the EII that has the Adaptec A400 SCSI card.
And yes you can downgrade to an EII+ by changing the Main and Scanner Eprom to ones formated for that version.