• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

SCSI in a Tandy 1000 TL/2

M

mikem

Member
Joined
Sep 13, 2010
Messages
40
Help!! I have a Seagate ST02 SCSI card with BIOS v3.3 and a Seagate ST32272N 2GB drive I'm trying to install in a Tandy 1000 TL/2 When I first installed them, the card detected the drive and told me it needed to be formatted. I said yes with an interleave of 1. It said it was formatting but nothing really happened... the drive activity light was out and it didnt make any noises. I let it sit there for about 20 minutes and still nothing hapened so I rebooted. Now the SCSI card doesn't detect the drive at all.

Anyone have any suggestions on how I can get this beast to work, or if it's even possible? I have the SCSI card configured with the following settings:

BIOS Address: CC000h
Zero Wait State: Disable
Interrupt: Int. Disable
HD Emulation Register: Disable
Terminator Power: Enable

The SCSI drive is jumpered as follows:

Terminator Power from Bus
Terminator Enabled

I've read a bunch of stuff that says the ST02 is a beast to work with & lots of people have had bad luck with it. Should I just get a different SCSI card or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks for any help you can provide!!
 
Have you tried to format the hard disk with a different SCSI card, or with the same SCSI card on a better machine? Some SCSI cards may have 8-bit compatibility, but their BIOS use 80386 instructions. If this is the case, you may have problem since the Tandy 1000 TL/2 processor is only 80286
 
The ST02 was very early in SCSI history and was manufactured to sell early Seagate SCSI drives. So don't get your hopes up on something as large as a 1GB drive, as I'm pretty sure that the ST02 knows nothing about 10 and 13 byte SCSI command blocks, which a 1GB drive would require.

A SCSI drive should never be low-level formatted. Many drives (and your 1GB may be one of them) may not even support the command, which is why nothing happened when you tried--the drive was probably spitting back command after command.

There are better 8-bit SCSI controllers, if you can find them. For example, the DTC 3150 / 3250 controllers were very popular and might be a better choice.
 
mikem

SCSI used to be a cheap and effective way way to go for Tandy fans. A good combo, known to work in the 1000 series, is the Trantor T130B SCSI 8-bit controller and the Maxtor 7245SR (200 MB). The only problem with the Trantor is that the price has skyrocketed to about $100 USC or more on eBay. I would recommend this forum's own XT-IDE controller project.
 
I've got a couple of Trantor boards that are missing the T130B. Since I'm now set up to read simple PALs, if someone has one to contribute to the effort, I think this would free up a bunch of these things, as they were packaged (PAL-less) with a bunch of CD-ROM kits.

I"m willing to suss out a PAL and get them duplicated into GALs (which I have a bunch of), if anyone's interested.
 
Thanks for the info everyone. I'm going to try and track down a Trantor or one of those DTC boards.
 
Agent Orange said:
mikem

SCSI used to be a cheap and effective way way to go for Tandy fans. A good combo, known to work in the 1000 series, is the Trantor T130B SCSI 8-bit controller and the Maxtor 7245SR (200 MB). The only problem with the Trantor is that the price has skyrocketed to about $100 USC or more on eBay. I would recommend this forum's own XT-IDE controller project.
Click to expand...

Is anyone selling complete XT-IDE cards? I am fairly useless when it comes to working with a soldering iron and I don't think I could manage building one myself.

Thanks.
 
Try the wanted section. But there are a couple of efforts in development at the moment so I think it is likely that there will be some boards available at some point. Months rather than weeks though.
 
I was never able to get a T-130B to work properly, or at least boot, in a TL/2. The T-128, on the other hand, works just dandy. I imagine the difference has to do with the selectable ROM addresses...


T-130B
------
CA00h
CE00h
DA00h
DE00h

T-128
-----
CC00h
C800h
DC00h
D800h
 
What about an Always Technology AL-500? I can pick up one of these cards but I don't know anything about them. I would want to be able to boot from the hard drive.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top