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Please note also - THIS BLOG ENDS HERE WITH THE LAST ENTRY FROM NOVEMBER 9th 2021.

I have prepared a new blog with wordpress at https://vintagecomputing.info !!!

Thank you.

After recognizing many errors while reading and writing files on my MFM hard disk drive, I decided to exchange my hard disk drive with a SCSI one.
This resulted in a longer search for an appropriate 8-bit ISA bus SCSI controller, my favorites were Future Domain TMC-850 and Seagate ST-02. I was able to swap some ISA cards with a Seagate ST-02 finally.
Because this Seagate ST-02 also supported (physically, see note below) high density floppy drives, it came in my mind to add such a floppy drive, too.
This wasn't so easy as I thought, because the mentioned Seagate ST-02 controller didn't support HD floppy drives by included BIOS. Instead, only hard disk drive support is added by that BIOS :-(
So I had to look for an alternative solution. I tried "800.com", a BIOS extension from an italian author, but it doesn't work too. Luckily there was a working solution left, "2M30", which includes a BIOS extension 2M-XBIOS.EXE (you have to include it in your CONFIG.SYS).
Also, I had to figure out how to initialize that SCSI HDD, it worked not only with debug, but also with this nice small utility named "FINDINIT".

That's how it looked after several attempts to get it working. But I finally managed it, thanks to the 2M utility (see related link also):


P.S.: I found also a device driver named JDRDISK.SYS, mentioned in the vintage-computer.com forum. I had to patch it to get it running, because DOS version check was very strange implemented. Try for yourself, it still didn't worked for me to use HD drives with it.