Technical questions for the MPC2000xl and the MPC2000

By browndogg Tue Apr 24, 2007 1:58 am
I'm using 1.14....
I do plan on upgrading(to 1.20), but I'm having a problem w/ my floppy drive on my pc, it won't recognize any disk...............
not sure if i want to go ahead and cut and snip my mpc floppy and install card reader without the next upgrade already installed.... what if card reader has problems, then I'm screwed..... I guess I'm getting ahead of myself with the CF card, I'm trying to put 1 gig+ of samples on the (2gig)card from my mac and/or/PC and I can't get more than 500mb on the card. It's fresh out the package, didn't format on mac or pc.
I wondering if I should wait untill the card reader is installed in the mpc then format the 2gig CF card in the mpc, and try again to get samples from my mac and pc(thinking/out/loud)............

By .spec Tue Aug 07, 2007 11:55 pm
subcons wrote:Got it! The IDE ribbon was the culprit. It didn't have a tab on it like the one end of the OEM ribbon to hold it down on the board. It was just flopping around in there. I noticed it when I first put it on but didn't think much of it. I just broke the tab off the EOM one and made it a little longer with some electrical tape and plastic and it booted right up.


THANK YOU!!! :D

The 'NO FLOPPY DEVICE' message was driving me up the wall and I couldn't for the life of me work out why it wasn't doing the auto-switch to ATAPI. It took a while to work out what tab you were referring to, until I compared the ends of both OEM and new IDE cable. So for anyone else F-ing and blinding, he's a few things I learnt...

1) PREP YOUR IDE CABLE IN ADVANCE!

Use a precision screwdriver or solder tool to remove the tab that secures the flat cable to the end of an OEM IDE cable. Rather than attacking from the top and prising it out, go at it from the sides, as it's clipped in place down near the socket holes. Push these in and then push the tab out. I ended up breaking the OEM socket, but worth it for a nice secure fitting short IDE cable!

Fold your new IDE cable over and fit the tab down so's it looks like a regular OEM cable - this will ensure PIN1 is in the correct position

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2) JUMPER AND PIN1 POSITIONS

I found the jumper on my model needs to sit closest to the IDE socket. I guess these are all the same batch of IISDMC's. As shown, PIN1 is nearest the power suppy (a mistake I'd made earlier, as without the tab, it looks like PIN1 is in the opposite corner)

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3) PROTECT THE FRONT PANEL OF THE CARD READER

The front panel of these card readers are *damn* fragile!

Tightly fold a short length of electrical tape over the front - top to bottom - to hold it in place, then wrap a length around the front of the reader to give it a bit more protection. Reason? When fitting back into the chassis, the corner that sits proud of the chassis is a real fecker to get in and out. Given that the front panel sticks out of the chassis and it's only secured to the main body of the reader with thin bits of plastic, well... :? Once the install is complete, slice off the short length that's covering the card slots. Safe as houses!

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So, where to buy in the UK? I got mine >> here << with a power lead and IDE cable - it all came to £82.08 including VAT and p&p. Ordered on Sunday afternoon and the package arrived Tuesday morning via UPS. It works fine with OS1.14, tho I've now upgraded to 1.20 after confirming that SCSI is still fulling functioning on the new OS.

Media? I've found I get the same 2Gb SD card issue as noted elsewhere (the MPC only sees 1024Mb). After reading all the other threads about storage, I've gone with 1Gb Kingston 50x CF cards. I had problems when transferring Zip100 & 200 content to my PC a while back - each .mid file seemed to be split into separate channels, resulting in "XYZ.mid already exists! Overwrite Yes/No" on the PC. This doesn't happen when sharing SD/CF media between the MPC and PC, so I'm putting that down to degraded zip disks.

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Last point - try and do this on the weekend. I got in from work at 9:30 and didn't finish this til about 1am. What can I say? I was excited to get this mod done. Now it's up and running I'm dead chuffed! It's really not a difficult mod and the benefits of being able to hot-swap material between the MPC and computer in seconds is SWEET! Zero noise when saving/loading makes such a nice change, workflow has been reduced and, most importantly, creativity has increased!