Re phrased my question - How do I get a Hard Drive recognised on an EIII?

[Shogun]

Hi all,
I have a Quantum Fireball circa 1992 that when installed in my EIII allows the system to boot from floppy, then mounts the drive but I cannot find it after it settles into play mode.

When you enter Disk Utilities/Format I cannot find the drive. Is there anyway to invoke the drive to get it seen?

For ref - Other drives I've tried (Quantum Prodrive) don't allow the EIII to do anything when switched on. The LCD is lit but blank and the floppy doesn't work! Could this be ID conflict? I've changed it between 1 to 4.

Any experience of this welcomed.

[esynthesist]

FYI: My EIII has a Quantum Prodrive LPS 540 as internal hard drive and it works like a charm.
I have no other hard drive installed, and the floppy is working too.

The Quantum drive is terminated (by default - no jumper to disable it) and the only jumper that has been set is for the SCSI, which is set to 1 with a jumper on A0.

Good luck.

[Shogun]

Thanks esynthesist for the info.

I have two 170 meg Quantum Prodrive ELS disks but I don't know what model they are. There are no clues on the casing. They were given to me by a video editing friend. I jumpered them for SCSI ID 1 (ie AO) but the EIII shows a blank(but lit) screen. The floppy does not load when the boot disk is inserted either.

I was reallly hoping the Prodrive would make a good replacement for the original Conner drive. The Fireball allows the system to boot from floppy as normal but you just can't find it to format it?

I may have to order the SCSI for Samplers CF setup but some report they are unable to install the op sys on this. Any experience?

I have purchased a Roland S770 with an internal 40meg drive. I haven't looked inside it yet to see what drive they used.

Thanks again for your interest.

[esynthesist]

Regarding the CF drive from SCSIForSamplers: I have this one too (based on IODATA IDE/SCSI board) and I have not succeeded yet to make it work with the Emulator III.
I thought I was able to use it for reading/writing banks (but not booting), but even writing banks seems not to be possible. I used even very old slow 64MB CF cards, but no success.

On this group another member mentioned that they are also selling now CF SSD drives based on the ACARD 7720U IDE/SCSI board. This board *may* work with the EIII, although it will still be necessary to find proper CF cards for it. We will get feedback from him...

One last note: if my EIII is showing a blank screen, it means that there's no HD found on SCSI ID 1. Last week I had this problem because - by mistake - I had configured my CF drive to SCSI 4; after changing it to SCSI 1, the display went back to normal.
Also make sure the drive is terminated (most Quantum Prodrive models have a jumper for that - mine was too old and was "hard" terminated by exception...)

///E-Synthesist

[Shogun]

Thanks again esynthesist for your info.

I will double check the jumpering and termination on the Prodrives. Re blank screen:
It makes sense that it can't find an HD as this would stop it from booting from floppy. I understand there must be an internal HD in the chain which explains why the previous owner did not remove it. It whines and groans but it stops after a while and running the op sys from floppy is not that unbearable. I have a ProOpt 230 MO in the external chain so I can read/write to that. I just like things to be as they should.

Not sure I'll buy the SCSIForSamplers CF solution just yet.

Many thanks.

 

[potscrubber]

On this group another member mentioned that they are also selling now CF SSD drives based on the ACARD 7720U IDE/SCSI board. This board *may* work with the EIII, although it will still be necessary to find proper CF cards for it. We will get feedback from him...

Update on that here:

http://eiiiforum.com/index.php?topic=396.msg4500#msg4500