Share your knowledge on these two classic MPCs
By optimus prime Mon May 30, 2005 5:33 pm
i have an s950 with the scsi card. i use a dac scsi drive which takes 44mb cartridges. it may be something to do with me but when i try and load stuff from the scsi drive it often says harddrive not ready or something along those lines. then all the ligths flash and i have to go back and try again.

im just wondering whether this could be to do with my drive being old and the disks being a bit past it?

so i was thinking about getting a 100mb zip drive. i know i wouldnt be able to use the full 100mb (60 is the limit i think) if the zip drive works well with an s950 without this harddrive message popping up then i think i will pick one up.

any ideas/comments?

op
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By mikedean Tue May 31, 2005 4:16 am
Optimus,

I have learned way more than I ever wanted to about the S950 and SCSI. I aquired a non functioning S950 with IB-109 SCSI card. I found the problem to be the EPROMs which contain the OS. I replaced these with the latest OS from VST but I could not get my zip drive to work., I had the same symtoms you have (Hard drive not ready...). I looked at the EPROMs and they were labelled IB109 V1.2. The replacements read "S950 1.2A" I found that the S950 with IB-109 requires a special OS. Do you have the IB-109 card or IB-105? Does your boot up screen look like this? ...
Image

If so you have the correct OS and it is probably a fault on the SCSI card or a configuration issue. We can get to the bottom of it anyway. Oh and yes Zip100 drives work fine. The sampler will see the first 60MB.

By fobedafied Tue May 31, 2005 5:03 am
thats what my s950/ib-109 screen looks like on bootup... mine works great with the HD it came with, ive yet to try a Zip...

By optimus prime Tue May 31, 2005 4:15 pm
thanks for the info mikedean. i will check and post back later.

fobedafied what kind of harddisk do you use with your sampler?

op

By optimus prime Tue May 31, 2005 7:36 pm
i have checked and the screen looks the same as your picture. and further sugesstions?

op
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By mikedean Tue May 31, 2005 9:53 pm
You say it work sometimes? If so I would suspect the drive. You can pick up a 100MB SCSI Zip drive without spending a lot of money and try it out. I would suggest trying a Zip drive and see how that works.

By optimus prime Wed Jun 01, 2005 3:01 pm
thanks i'll pick one up and give it a go.

op

By optimus prime Wed Jun 01, 2005 3:03 pm
just thought can you buy scsi cables that go from that big scsi connector to the smaller one on the back of zips? im assuming you can... is it gonna be called a centronics db 50 - db 25 connector? or something like that. wanna know roughly what its called for when i go to my local pc shop to get one.

op
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By mikedean Wed Jun 01, 2005 3:29 pm
Yeah I think that is what it is called. Centronics 50 pin to 25 pin SCSI cable.

By optimus prime Wed Jun 01, 2005 6:55 pm
thanks, im away from setup for a week or so but when i get back i will let you know how i got on.

op