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MSD SD-2 dual-floppy and/or TEC FB-501 SSD 180kb drives

Maverick1978

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 29, 2010
Messages
1,966
Location
Florida, USA
Hey, guys...

I got one of these off of ebay, and it got tossed around a lot in shipment, taking several bumps and dents into the steel casing. My theory is that if it got hit hard enough to bend the steel corners of the case, dent the casing, etc, then the reverberating shocks could've been enough to physically damage the drives as well.

Visually, the drive mechs are good - I know that I've got to clean and lube the rails, and that the heads will need cleaning.

The MSD PCB seems to respond correctly when I have it in the dual-drive config, and in single drive config, but if it doesn't work after cleaning/lubing when I connect it to my C64, I'm stuck on troubleshooting, outside of determining if I've an alignment problem (i.e. it reads/formats/writes to a blank, but those disks aren't readable in other drives, and it can't read factory disks)

I've the old Spirit 5140 Alignment disk/program, but doubt that it would be compatible with the MSD unit, which leaves me to using a PC controller card to align the drives.

The drives used are TEC FB-501 180kb drives, and from what I can find, they were used in Kaypro II's, among others. I'm assuming that these drives would be able to hook up to a PC controller card, as it appears to have the 34-pin edge connector, but I've never seen or used a 180kb drive on a PC. How would one go about configuring the individual drives for use on the PC? I don't recall seeing any 180kb options in the various setup disks or in any PC BIOS that I've been in?

As far as hardware, I've a 5150 w/ dual 360's and an IBM controller card, a 5160 w/ IBM controller card, a 5170 w/ after-market controller card, and the various flavors of 486-pentium era computers w/ controller cards/chips on-board.
 
I had the same problems, turns out the caps degrade and eat the boards.

http://personalpages.tds.net/~rcarlsen/tdsweb/MSD%20SD-2/MSD%20repairs/MSD.txt

I sent my bad drive off to Ray for repair.

He replaced the caps and fixed the broken traces (some were underneath the chips.).
It works great now.

http://personalpages.tds.net/~rcarlsen/

Later,
dabone


I checked Ray's pages, too - I haven't pulled Flobby PCBs yet, but will be doing so, as that seems to be the failure point of the TEC-501 drives.

My main issue is that the item was packaged poorly, was in transit for 16 days (it was sent to the wrong addy at least twice, from the tracking), and it took a LOT of hits and damages during shipment when comparing auction pictures to how it arrived - it ended up with 3 rolled ends on the steel case along with multiple dings on edges and throughout 3 of the 6 sides (there was 1 ding in the auction pictures, minor, near the PET connector on the back). That said, the damage APPEARS to be cosmetic. The SD-2 powers on, and the main MSD PCB seems to be working correctly as evidenced by the LEDs (i.e. it seems to pass internal diagnostics), and it fails those internal diags when I purposefully hooked up the non-jumpered drive in a single-drive configuration, as it should've. I'm just worried that the TEC FB-501 drive mechs inside the SD-2 casing may have taken residual damage from the hits that the thing took in transit, and am looking to see if they can be hooked to a PC for troubleshooting if need be.
 
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