{"id":1034,"date":"2016-08-14T16:24:17","date_gmt":"2016-08-14T21:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/?p=1034"},"modified":"2020-06-20T12:42:12","modified_gmt":"2020-06-20T17:42:12","slug":"heathkit-h89a-floppy-config-attempted-boot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/heathkit-h89a-floppy-config-attempted-boot\/","title":{"rendered":"Heathkit H89A – floppy config & attempted boot"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve tried every disk in every drive with what I thought was the working configuration, to no avail.\u00a0 Every failure is the same: hitting ‘b’ to boot, getting ~5 seconds of disk activity, and failing with ‘? Boot Error’.\u00a0 Heads appear to be in impeccable condition, and the disks look clean.\u00a0 Here’s a closeup of the heads on the hard sector drive:<\/p>\n

\"Floppy<\/a><\/p>\n

And here’s the collection of disks I’m working with:<\/p>\n

\"img_6437\"<\/a> \"img_6439\"<\/a><\/p>\n

SW501,4 controls which card to boot from:
\n0 = H88-1 Card at P506\/P512 (the right most slot), I\/O Port 174
\n1 = Z89-37 Card at P504\/P510 (the left slot of the right bank, I\/O Port 170<\/p>\n

I’ve tried both; 0 boots to the internal, hard sector disk, 1 boots to the 1st drive in the H-37 enclosure, a 96tpi soft sector drive.<\/p>\n

The internal drive is set to Unit Zero (or DS1) for use with the H88-1 card
\n\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

But wait, we can also use this drive as a soft-sector drive on the the Z89-37 controller.\u00a0 Note that the drive settings are different:
\n\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, it’s backwards.\u00a0 My predecessor was nice enough to not cut the links, but to simply bend the pins of the package out.\u00a0 unfortunately, they’re super <\/em>fragile, and a single attempted bend broke the pin, several times. I ended up using a portion of the original package and some wire.<\/p>\n

Note that J4-J7 needs to be set correctly on the Z89-37 card.\u00a0 It’s now set to J4, meaning the single drive ID’s as DS1 plugged into P3 (the top port on the card) is Drive 0.<\/p>\n

As I was shuffling connectors and moving the board around, this happened (took me a few minutes of failed boots to spot):
\n\"img_6436\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I temporarily crammed it back in, and got to the H: prompt.\u00a0 Still won’t boot to a disk.<\/p>\n

I wonder if this is noteworthy:
\nEvery boot attempt seemed to take the same amount of time to fail (3-4 seconds), regardless of which configuration or even if a disk was present.\u00a0 When I jump J4 on the Z89-37 (what I believe to be the correct config), an attempted boot without a disk tries indefinitely and never fails.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve tried every disk in every drive with what I thought was the working configuration, to no avail.\u00a0 Every failure is the same: hitting ‘b’ to boot, getting ~5 seconds of disk activity, and failing with ‘? Boot Error’.\u00a0 Heads … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1035,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[66],"tags":[57,54,56],"table_tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1034"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1048,"href":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1034\/revisions\/1048"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1034"},{"taxonomy":"table_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulcarbone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/table_tags?post=1034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}