TT issues. Help welcome...
Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2017 3:42 pm
So, having received the TOS 3.06 UK ROMs, i finally unpacked the TT and tried it.
first i turned it on with the German TOS. it did the memory test:
4MB ST RAM
16MB TT RAM
The hard drive spins up but starts to make a "clanging" noise (similar to what i´ve heard on malfunctioning drives of later generations, though this one is much louder), which stops after a while during the boot process (during the part the black bar below the RAM tests is "shrinking" from right to left) and starts again when the computer goes to boot the OS, stopping when TOS is presented. The hard drive is an IBM DNES-309170W, which means it´s a 9.1GB instead of 4GB as described (?) when purchased...
it was interesting to see that using a modern LCD with VGA, i was able to display ST-Low, ST-Medium, ST-High, TT-Low and TT-Medium without having to reboot.
so, after checking the system was working with German TOS and already suspecting a failed HDD, i opened the machine to switch ROMs. i am attaching some photos. the ST-RAM board has the jumpers configured to 2MB from what i read online but the memory chips have the following markings: LH64256K-10
So, then i switch the ROMs, reinstall the 16MB RAM card and boot again and, yes, TOS is in english and everything appears to be working as before.
so then, i grab an Atari FDD which had Hard drive utilities, etc and try to boot with it. it detects the Hard drive but no HDD icon appears. i then try to configure it with HDDDriver (i took the opportunity to upgrade my version from 9.10 to 10.10) and if i tried to boot using the HDD 10.10 FDD, it shows both the IBM drive and HDDDriver on boot, but it freezes there and doesn´t finish booting. removing the floppy and letting it go to TOS, inserting the floppy again and running the HDDDriver utility had the following results:
with HDD9.10, on starting the program i received two messages saying that XHDI was not present but allowed me to continue and another saying no SCSI drivers were installed and i could also continue. With HDD10.10, it would start and show the devices and buses without issue.
however, any attempt to configure the IBM drive would result in either an error message or two "bombs" and back to desktop. i would also start receiving messages that "window could not be drawn - insuficiente memory" and freezes on the desktop. maybe this is all related to the HDD problem, maybe the ROMs or maybe there´s something else...
so, any ideas?
first i turned it on with the German TOS. it did the memory test:
4MB ST RAM
16MB TT RAM
The hard drive spins up but starts to make a "clanging" noise (similar to what i´ve heard on malfunctioning drives of later generations, though this one is much louder), which stops after a while during the boot process (during the part the black bar below the RAM tests is "shrinking" from right to left) and starts again when the computer goes to boot the OS, stopping when TOS is presented. The hard drive is an IBM DNES-309170W, which means it´s a 9.1GB instead of 4GB as described (?) when purchased...
it was interesting to see that using a modern LCD with VGA, i was able to display ST-Low, ST-Medium, ST-High, TT-Low and TT-Medium without having to reboot.
so, after checking the system was working with German TOS and already suspecting a failed HDD, i opened the machine to switch ROMs. i am attaching some photos. the ST-RAM board has the jumpers configured to 2MB from what i read online but the memory chips have the following markings: LH64256K-10
So, then i switch the ROMs, reinstall the 16MB RAM card and boot again and, yes, TOS is in english and everything appears to be working as before.
so then, i grab an Atari FDD which had Hard drive utilities, etc and try to boot with it. it detects the Hard drive but no HDD icon appears. i then try to configure it with HDDDriver (i took the opportunity to upgrade my version from 9.10 to 10.10) and if i tried to boot using the HDD 10.10 FDD, it shows both the IBM drive and HDDDriver on boot, but it freezes there and doesn´t finish booting. removing the floppy and letting it go to TOS, inserting the floppy again and running the HDDDriver utility had the following results:
with HDD9.10, on starting the program i received two messages saying that XHDI was not present but allowed me to continue and another saying no SCSI drivers were installed and i could also continue. With HDD10.10, it would start and show the devices and buses without issue.
however, any attempt to configure the IBM drive would result in either an error message or two "bombs" and back to desktop. i would also start receiving messages that "window could not be drawn - insuficiente memory" and freezes on the desktop. maybe this is all related to the HDD problem, maybe the ROMs or maybe there´s something else...
so, any ideas?