First post, by MMaximus
- Rank
- Oldbie
Managed to install a MFM hard drive in my Turbo XT recently 😀
I found a WD1002A-WX1 8-bit MFM interface in a bag of parts I got given when I bought a lot of systems a while ago. In the bag was also one of these bezels to stick on the front of a hard drive in order to mount it in a 5.25" bay. I always liked the look of these things - from the bygone era when there were no internal bays in PC cases and HDDs had to be mounted in the floppy drive bays...
I had this spare 20Mb Kalok KL-320 MFM drive I removed from a 286 machine. I tried installing it in my XT with the WD interface but it wouldn't work. Checked the jumpers, they appeared to be set up correctly so I burned the "F300" Bios (found here) on an Atmel chip and stuck it on the card. Still wouldn't work. The MFM drive was working in the 286 machine, but I understood I needed to low-level format it in the XT for the computer to recognize it. After summoning the formatting utility from the WD BIOS and formatting the drive, it was just a matter of FDISK and format... and now I have glorious MFM soundtrack in my XT 🤣
Curious to know if any of you are also using MFM drives in your XT systems? How do you deal with file transfers? I was using an XT-IDE-CF card before but of course it can't work with the MFM interface so I'm sacrificing easy file transfers and also HD floppy support. I plan to get around that by installing an 8-bit network card in the system and using mTCP.
Also, since the case only has two external bays I'm sacrificing dual floppies. I need to find a working 5.25" 360k black drive - this one in 1.2M and doesn't seem to read disks. I could also hide the MFM in the third bay (internal) but then it wouldn't look as vintage 🤣