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IBM 5155 - attempting HD fix, and XT-IDE recommendations?

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bitfixer

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Hi all, hope everyone's doing well.
I just came across an IBM 5155 today, quite excited to fire it up. It seems to be in reasonably good shape, the seller said it boots to BASIC. There were a few upgrades on this machine including RAM and replacing one of the floppies with a 20 MB HD. The HD is reported to be not spinning up, unfortunately.
First, I'm wondering if there is anything simple (and non-destructive) I could try to perhaps coax it into life again. I have yet to turn it on so not sure about the exact symptoms yet.
I addition, I'd like to add an XT-IDE interface and perhaps use a CF or SD card. Any recommendations on a specific variety that would work well in the 5155? Anything about this model that requires special consideration?
Thanks very much!
 
What kind of drive is it? I’ve got a late 5160 that has a full height seagate ST-412. When I got it it wouldn’t spin up. Fortunately on mine it wasn’t that the heads were stuck to the platters. Instead it was the motor for the spindle was stuck and also there was a bad connection for the power cable going from the PCB to the drive. I pulled the board off, resoldered the power connector, and spun the drive a little by hand, not using much force in case the heads were stuck. By hand the spindle moved OK, but felt a little sticky. I put the board back on and powered the drive with an external molex power supply, just to have a little working room. The drive still didn’t want to spin. I used a little plastic knife and used it to turn the spindle by the fins on the bottom of it. After a bit of helping it along it finally started spinning on its own. I wasn’t able to get any data off of it, it still needed a low level format. I suppose it I had let it sit there running for a few hours to come up to temperature, maybe it would have booted again, but maybe not.
 
bitfixer said:
Hi all, hope everyone's doing well.
I just came across an IBM 5155 today, quite excited to fire it up. It seems to be in reasonably good shape, the seller said it boots to BASIC. There were a few upgrades on this machine including RAM and replacing one of the floppies with a 20 MB HD. The HD is reported to be not spinning up, unfortunately.
First, I'm wondering if there is anything simple (and non-destructive) I could try to perhaps coax it into life again. I have yet to turn it on so not sure about the exact symptoms yet.
I addition, I'd like to add an XT-IDE interface and perhaps use a CF or SD card. Any recommendations on a specific variety that would work well in the 5155? Anything about this model that requires special consideration?
pupilpath
Thanks very much!
Click to expand...
Boot to a floppy and type: "FDISK /MBR" and that will likely fix it. I installed an XTIDE in an IBM 5155, and after some trial and error (floppy I want to replace that hard drive with a 512 CF Card, but I need an XT So it might be worth you trying a different (turbo) XT BIOS in case your issue is BIOS related.
 
I would just go the XT-IDE route just to save weight.. It is a portable. How are the PSU voltages? That was the biggest problem fixing mine. I ended up gutting the PSU and installing another one in the PSU case.
 
Thanks very much for the information. I will open the 5155 up later this week when I get a little time and find out what type of drive it is, and check the PSU voltages. Most likely I will put the drive aside for now once I get an XT-IDE, and leave it as a future repair for now.
Any known issues with using a microSD to IDE device with the XT-IDE? I have one already, which is nice, along with many microSD cards, but no CF cards at the moment. So it would be convenient to go that route.
Will post again when I have some more info on the machine, thanks again.
 
bitfixer said:
Any known issues with using a microSD to IDE device with the XT-IDE? I have one already, which is nice, along with many microSD cards, but no CF cards at the moment. So it would be convenient to go that route.
Click to expand...

Start the countdown for someone to jump in and claim that SD cards are the devil, but personally I'm a huge fan of the PATA->SD adapters. I wouldn't use anything else with the 8-bit XT-CF XTIDE subsets because I've experienced massive compatibility issues with CF cards. (The chipset used on the PATA-SD cards I've bought is also used in CF to SD adapters so it fully supports some of the more obscure features like 8-bit mode.)
 
I’ve got a couple of XT-IDE and I find them very useful. But, I prefer original hardware if possible, but systems were constantly being upgraded, so my opinion of original is a moving target. Also if I had to pay $100 for an MFM hdd or $50 for an XT-IDE and CF adapter, I’m picking $50. Fortunately I’ve still got a pretty good pile of original hard drives
 
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