Brad Arnold sent his disks and a special prize, a 1050 hard drive. Yes an innovative Sysop of some yet to be discovered BBS placed a Seagate Hard Drive and Controller in a 1050 Case.
About 150 Floppy Disks from Brad arrived (Still waiting on the larger collection from Randy) and so far the random tests have been good as able to read the floppies. Some stuck together, definitely some age here and humidity.. Pulled out a back up disk which seems to be Josh Renaud’s BBS an Oasis based board called Club Christian. Also the 1982 AMIS Arcade BBS. Hard drive needs work to get running - 4 pin adapter which I ordered today.
Another suprise - A very well made 1030 Ring Detector! One for the Museum...
My efforts so far... Have not had time to mess with this in about 12 months but I thought I would send what I have along with the spreadsheet descriptions (in excel and office calc). The spreadsheets may be a little cryptic - ask questions.
For ease of access, here is the folder of all the floppies converted to ATR by Klepto.. Thanks again for Saving Those Floppies!
Big Thanks to Randy of Antic for sending out the latest box of non-commercial disks! Just arrived yesterday and will start sorting through the back later today!
@southernamis
So the other day I started on my batch of disks... I started off with HDSC, but it's a bit time consiming making sure that the source and destination match on their density. I couldn't try BFC cause I don't have it.
Then I found CopyMate 4.3 (https://atari.fox-1.nl/atari-400-800-xl-xe/400-800-xl-xe-tools/copymate-4-3/). And I like it. Just insert source and destination and the program will take care of the rest.
Such a great story.. Have a read from Break into Chat written by Josh Renaud https://breakintochat.com/blog/2023/07/19/unearthed-my-old-oasis-bbs-atari-floppy-disk/
So I have a "how-are-we-copying" question. Are we doing the SpartaDOS COPY command (star.dot.star) or using a copy program?
Status of the hard drive: On its way to John Polka for further testing.. Returned the Controller to Tillek (Thank you!) and lets see if I got something wrong after the diagnostic from JP!
FYI - Phigan worked with Ken of AA fame and he has a black box in case we need to see if this was a BB run drive..
The effort continues and I get back some much needed time for the Southern Amis coding project for the new BBS.. Thanks all!
Another question... someone who knows about the Blackbox will have to answer this one. Didn't the BB have 512 byte sectors but only use 256 bytes of each one?
Controller from Tillek arrived and finally got to further testing and recovery yesterday.. Man these last few weeks have been busy! So we have communication from the Board to the MIO. All setting for the controller, hard drive and MIO are confirmed based upon input from this group and the various manuals provided..
Working on this issue further this weekend but here is the video of where we are. Its progress compared to the prior status but still some challenges as you will see and hear..
Tillek for the win! Yup our SFHQ sysop has a loaner Adaptect Controller for the Seagate 225 and sending it over for the cause! Thanks Tillek for the assist! Let hope this doesn't turn out to be a bunch of MIDI but a real historical bbs!
Latest update: Box of floppies handed off to Klepto for additional support converting the floppies to ATRs. Will be looking to hold a community call to discuss inventory and hosting of the files for the next step in preserving these treasures. Will post on the Southern Amis BBS the follow up details for scheduling the call. All will be welcome to the discussion and welcome community input to continue to be highly successful.
And the work begins.....
The right question, regardless of drive, MIO, Controller, settings, etc is the indicators at the time of start up. JP provided his example on the bottom. As you can see the start up (top video) of the drive in question has a quick red flash and JP's has the green status indicating reading..
Also sound wise to me, the platter isn't moving...
The work continues...
Hard Drive controller maybe bad.. Lots of chips and the power supply heating up. Drive powers on, MIO config locks up to save config on Sector 0/0.. Time for more testing…
I've done a little more than 100 disk sides so far... more to go. Here's a spreadsheet outlining my efforts to date...
Sweet. I just picked up 50 disks locally, one has BBS written on it, but it seems to be just the stock BBS software, nothing indicating it was ever an actual BBS. Amazed that the disks work though!!!
Awesome stuff! 😀
Great find. Wish I could find my old ring detector... much cooler looking. :)
Can't wait to see what you find.