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Trying to use an ST11R to access an IBM 5170 hard drive

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arrow_runner

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A lot of the labeling on the hard drive is faded but one sticker is still perfect that says Manufactured by IBM Corp Type 0665.

I have the ST11R in my tweener which still needs the Win9X/DOS and Linux OSes re-installed. On boot-up the card says

Drive 1 is not initialized. Run DEBUG install routine...
Click to expand...

I looked up some documentation and it sounds like it wants to do a low level format of the drive. I really don't want to do that because if this is my old 5170 then I'd love to get some files off first.

I also saw where DOS needs a driver for the ST11R. Right now I've tried letting the system boot from the IBM drive but it just tries a couple times and fails. I've booted from a DOS 6.2 floppy and the only thing I get from there is running FDISK says error reading fixed disk and exits immediately.

So my 2 questions here are:
  1. Is the 'Debug install routine' just a low level format utility?
  2. Does DOS 6.2 need a driver to see the drive? DMDRVR.BIN and SSTOR.SYS were the two drivers I saw.


Thanks!
 
Is the ST11R the same controller that the drive in the 5170 was created and operated with? If not, you're out of luck. MFM/RLL drives are rarely interchangeable across controllers. Either find an original matching controller to the original or bite the bullet and low-level format the drive.

FWIW, you'll get better performance if you use a 16-bit controller in your 5170.
 
Thanks that's very helpful actually.

I did not know that about the drives not being very interchangeable. I can probably use the original controller out of the 5170. I didn't try it because the expansion slot screws are rusted badly and will need to be just cut out and I thought I'd be okay using the ST11R. This will just have to wait for another day after I've cleaned up the garage a bit and can get to my dremel.

Right now I'm not concerned with getting the 5170 itself running because the case is rusted badly. In fact I barely got the lid to come off... The internals might actually be okay though once cleaned up. You wouldn't think that this hard drive came out of a rusted box.
 
The 0665 is one of the original drives that came with the 5170. It's 30mb, MFM.

Like Chuck said, you'll need the original controller to get anything off that drive (and the ST11R is not the original controller). The ST11R is RLL and the IBM 0665 was probably used with an MFM controller since it is an MFM drive. I have one and it's a really nice drive in perfect condition.

http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?32719-IBM-0665-30-mb-MFM-drive
 
Yeah it's just a matter of getting the original controller out of the case that's the issue.

Also, For some reason I thought I read that the ST11R worked with both RLL and MFM drives. I just checked because of what you said and it looks like the ST11M is for MFM drives and the ST11R is for RLL drives. That's definitely good to know!
 
Even if the ST11R does work with both types of drives you would need to reformat the 0665 with the ST11R controller since the 0665 wasn't formatted with the ST11R originally.
 
A little bit of penetrating oil (liquid wrench, kerosene or even WD-40) on the rusted screws and then after a few hours (I'm assuming it's a hex=head screw) easing it out with a nutdriver should do the trick.
 
Chuck(G) said:
A little bit of penetrating oil (liquid wrench, kerosene or even WD-40) on the rusted screws and then after a few hours (I'm assuming it's a hex=head screw) easing it out with a nutdriver should do the trick.
Click to expand...

Oh this isn't surface rust. These screws are really deteriorated!
 
I'm not saying that you'll be able to re-use the screws, but you might succeed in getting them out without breaking them or having to drill them out.
 
Yeah I'm just going to have to bring the dremel home...



And it looks like the battery back inside leaked all over the motherboard, but that's a story for another thread :/

 
Sure looks that way...

I got the board out and stuck it in my tweener but nothing came up so I'm assuming it's probably conflicting and needs to be changed to a different i/o address. Problem is that I can't find any documentation on the board. It appears to be a 55X9520



There's a block of 3 jumpers in the middle and another jumper on the far left.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated. I'm SOOO close to finding out if this was my old 5170!
 
Ouch...painful to see that poor system messed up by the battery. Same thing happened to my Tandy 3000HD. I managed to get it apart and the motherboard looks reasonably good...just need to replace two or three resistors/capacitors and give it another try. Biggest issue is the rusted condition of much of the case... :-(

Good luck with your data retrieval efforts! At least the damage didn't affect the hard drive!

Wesley
 
Awesome. The cabling helped too.

Here's where I'm at so far. The card is at least partially working because I can boot from a 1.44mb floppy connected to it. The system's BIOS auto-detects the drive as fixed disk, so the system at least recognizes that 'something' is hooked up. I switched it to type 20 to match the drive exactly but when the system goes to try to boot from the hard drive it just pauses for a couple seconds before moving on and the hard drive doesn't seem to try to do anything. Booting from DOS 6.2 on the floppy still gives me an error in fdisk and that's all I get.

At this point I'm going to just hope that it's some incompatibility in my tweener (a Pentium 3) and get another system up to try it from there.
 
Cleared.

Back on topic here, I've got at least half a dozen 286 machines and not one of them seems to be working 100%. I also have 2 or 3 more 5170 MFM controller boards but I was getting the same results in the 286 I was trying them in. At this point I'm shelving this part of the project and I'm just going to focus on rebuilding a working 5170. I have two of them. The other machine did not have anywhere near the internal corrosion that the one pictured above had so I cleaned it up last night and will probably use the above one as a donor machine for it.
 
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