SIEMENS FDD 100-5

[Tom Wilson]

I have resurrected several of these drives over
the years but this one has me stumped. Anyone
like to give it a try? It would be good for parts
if nothing else.





Tom Wilson
Prineville Oregon

[Dave McGuire]

On 9/7/23 17:58, Tom Wilson wrote:
> I have resurrected several of these drives over
> the years but this one has me stumped. Anyone
> like to give it a try? It would be good for parts
> if nothing else.

I've fixed a bunch of these too. I'm curious, what's the symptom?

-Dave

--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA

[Joseph Travis]

If Dave doesn't take it, I will.  I have a "parts" drive that I might be able to use to get one of them going.

BR,

Joe

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[Dave McGuire]

Go for it Joe, I just wanted to tear into it if nobody else would.
These are almost always recoverable, assuming the head coils are ok, so
I was very curious about a "big" failure.

-Dave

On 9/7/23 18:59, Joseph Travis wrote:
> If Dave doesn't take it, I will.  I have a "parts" drive that I might
> be able to use to get one of them going.
>
> BR,
> Joe
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 7, 2023, 6:00 PM Dave McGuire <mcg...@neurotica.com
> <mailto:mcg...@neurotica.com>> wrote:
>
> On 9/7/23 17:58, Tom Wilson wrote:
> > I have resurrected several of these drives over
> > the years but this one has me stumped. Anyone
> > like to give it a try? It would be good for parts
> > if nothing else.
>
>    I've fixed a bunch of these too.  I'm curious, what's the symptom?
>
>              -Dave
>
> --
> Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
> New Kensington, PA
>
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[Glenn Roberts]

I’ve got quite a few of these that are in an inoperative state. Could probably use some help from this group getting them going again. Good winter project…

Sent from my iPad

> On Sep 8, 2023, at 3:58 AM, Dave McGuire <mcg...@neurotica.com> wrote:
>
> 

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[Dave McGuire]

Hi Glenn, I can probably help when the time comes. Do you have a
drive exerciser? They're very useful for that sort of troubleshooting.

-Dave

[Peter Higgins]

On Thursday, September 7, 2023 at 7:43:22 PM UTC-7 glenn.f...@gmail.com wrote:

I’ve got quite a few of these that are in an inoperative state. Could probably use some help from this group getting them going again. Good winter project…

Same problem here. None of the half dozen Siemens FDD 100-5 drives I have acquired from vintage Heath drive enclosures is functional. I've been hoping to get at least a couple of them working before tossing them.

[Dave McGuire]

On 9/8/23 09:50, Peter Higgins wrote:
> I’ve got quite a few of these that are in an inoperative state.
> Could probably use some help from this group getting them going
> again. Good winter project…
>
> Same problem here. None of the half dozen Siemens FDD 100-5 drives I
> have acquired from vintage Heath drive enclosures is functional. I've
> been hoping to get at least a couple of them working before tossing them.

Please don't toss them, it's not like they'll be making any more!
These are very repairable drives, for the most part.

[Glenn Roberts]

I don’t have a drive exerciser. What is that? A special piece of equipment?

Sent from my iPad

> On Sep 8, 2023, at 4:51 PM, Dave McGuire <mcg...@neurotica.com> wrote:

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[Dave McGuire]

On 9/8/23 10:01, Glenn Roberts wrote:
> I don’t have a drive exerciser. What is that? A special piece of equipment?

Yes, it connects to a disk drive and allows you to manipulate it in
various ways. The one I use is a Lynx 450, see attached pic. The front
panel is self-explanatory.

[Wilko Stronks]

I just restored an H8 and H17, but both Wangco 82 drives don't functional well. 

Replaced them with 2 Shugart 400's and all is operational.

I would really like to get the original Wango 82 drives working again.

They supposed to be similar to the Siemens FDD 100-5?

I used H8D Utility and H89LDR to create HDOS boot and system disks.

That worked fine with the Shugart 400's, but not with the WANGCO 82's

The Wango 82 drives did format and I could write disk-images to them using the utilities, but these disk would not boot or could be read from.

I don't have an exerciser, but could connect them to a DOS system running Imagedisk.

Wilko

Op vrijdag 8 september 2023 om 16:02:16 UTC+2 schreef glenn.f...@gmail.com:

[smb...@gmail.com]

A few times I've thought about making a DIY drive exerciser.  I always solve whatever the problem is before I get around to designing my exerciser.

The solution space ranges from devices that are little more than switches and LEDs connected to the individual drive signals, to devices that take an input for a track number and step to it. Maybe some devices that can even read or write simple data patterns. Exercisers do come up on ebay from time to time. It seems like a good project for an atmega or similar device. What you need to do kinda depends on the problem you're trying to solve.

Scott 

[Dave McGuire]

On 9/8/23 11:03, smb...@gmail.com wrote:
> A few times I've thought about making a DIY drive exerciser.  I always
> solve whatever the problem is before I get around to designing my exerciser.
>
> The solution space ranges from devices that are little more than
> switches and LEDs connected to the individual drive signals, to devices
> that take an input for a track number and step to it. Maybe some devices
> that can even read or write simple data patterns. Exercisers do come up
> on ebay from time to time. It seems like a good project for an atmega or
> similar device. What you need to do kinda depends on the problem you're
> trying to solve.

I've looked at it a few times myself, but always had more important
things to work on. Stumbling across that little Lynx unit addressed the
problem for me. I may still design one, eventually.

[Steven Hirsch]

On 9/8/23 10:40, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On 9/8/23 10:01, Glenn Roberts wrote:
>> I don’t have a drive exerciser. What is that? A special piece of equipment?
>
>   Yes, it connects to a disk drive and allows you to manipulate it in various
> ways.  The one I use is a Lynx 450, see attached pic.  The front panel is
> self-explanatory.

Another variation on the same theme.

[Dave McGuire]

Yes! Very nice indeed.

[Les Bird]

You can probably program the Adafruit Feather (RP2040) and the floppy adapter they have for it to do some nice drive excersizing. It has level converters built-in to the adapter and a nice library to do floppy things like seek, read and write. So the hard part of building an interface to drive the floppy drives is already solved here.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/5679

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Floppy

Les

[Glenn Roberts]

I presume Siemens bought out Wangco? The Wangco drives were what Heath initially shipped with the H17, but they were soon replaced by the Siemens. They are quite similar. There were also Perkin Elmer drives. Not sure where they fit into the picture…

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 8, 2023, at 5:42 PM, Wilko Stronks <wilkos...@gmail.com> wrote:

I just restored an H8 and H17, but both Wangco 82 drives don't functional well. 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sebhc/45ab7003-2647-4eab-98f4-496c262bd66cn%40googlegroups.com.

[Terry Smedley]

XRSIZR.ABS

Here's a 1982  (HDOS) program from Henry Fale/Quikdata that uses the H17 controller to exercise drives.  It does a lot of what a standalone hardware exerciser can do.  IIRC, it uses some routines from H17 ROM - I have used it recently with PAM37, but I can't say whether it would work with third party ROMs.  Its primary advantage is that it requires nothing other than what is most likely already present in an H8 or H89.

[norberto.collado koyado.com]

Very nice to test out the new SDC-H17 controller when I get to it.

 

Thank you!

 

Norberto

 

From: se...@googlegroups.com <se...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Terry Smedley
Sent: Friday, September 8, 2023 8:11 PM
To: SEBHC <se...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [sebhc] SIEMENS FDD 100-5

 

XRSIZR.ABS

 

Here's a 1982  (HDOS) program from Henry Fale/Quikdata that uses the H17 controller to exercise drives.  It does a lot of what a standalone hardware exerciser can do.  IIRC, it uses some routines from H17 ROM - I have used it recently with PAM37, but I can't say whether it would work with third party ROMs.  Its primary advantage is that it requires nothing other than what is most likely already present in an H8 or H89.

 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sebhc/0a906385-2dd5-490d-ac3f-4c2a4f835547n%40googlegroups.com.

[Glenn Roberts]

Nice!

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 9, 2023, at 6:10 AM, Terry Smedley <terry....@gmail.com> wrote:

XRSIZR.ABS

Here's a 1982  (HDOS) program from Henry Fale/Quikdata that uses the H17 controller to exercise drives.  It does a lot of what a standalone hardware exerciser can do.  IIRC, it uses some routines from H17 ROM - I have used it recently with PAM37, but I can't say whether it would work with third party ROMs.  Its primary advantage is that it requires nothing other than what is most likely already present in an H8 or H89.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sebhc/0a906385-2dd5-490d-ac3f-4c2a4f835547n%40googlegroups.com.

<xrsizr.doc>

<xrsizr.asm>

<XRSIZR.png>

<xrsizr.abs>

<xrsz4mhz.doc>

[Tom Wilson]

I tried it again it spins and selects then the
head goes back and forth trying to read
but never does.  felt seems fine and no smoked
components head cleaned.  I can read the disk
I tested with on four other drives.

Tom

-- 
Tom Wilson
Prineville Oregon

[Wilko Stronks]

I connected my WANGCO 82 / Siemens FDD 100-5 drives to a DOS machine and used ImageDisk.

Was able to format and read/write successfully on SoftSector diskettes.

So my drives seemed to be OK.

When connecting them to the H8 I found out that I the jumper settings on the Program shunt were not right.

The H17 manual refers to pictorial 3 of the Illustration Booklet, but I cannot find that booklet.

I can now select a jumper setting to boot on both drives individually, but cannot find a setting for the jumper strip on both drives to be able to use both drives as SY0: and SY1:

Any suggestions?

I would also like to use the XRSIZR program. How could I easily transfer the ABS to my H8?

Use PIP or any other options?  Or if someone has an h8d image file containing XRSIZR.ABS that would work for me too.

Thanks,

Wilko

Op zaterdag 9 september 2023 om 18:26:43 UTC+2 schreef Tom Wilson:

[Joe Travis N6YPC]

Thank you very much Tom Wilson for the floppy drive and spare boards.  Thank you Terry Smedley for the XRSIZR software.  And thank you Curt Mayer for the H17 3-drive system.

I had 4 Siemens drives with various failures and made extensive use of the XRSIZR program to aid in troubleshooting.  Without going into the details on each one, I'll mention the common problems they all had (and I wasn't expecting):

1.  Dust, grime and oxidation affected the mechanical and electrical portions of the drives.

1a:  The connectors (J4, P4-1, P4-2) for the sensors, switches, solenoid, etc. uses tin pins and sockets.  I burnished the connections by removing / reinserting the connectors numerous times.

1b:  The shafts for the drive motor, flywheel and pressure hub were all dry.  In a couple cases, the problem made it appear as though the motor speed controller had no effect when adjusting (the drive I got from Tom had this problem).  I was unable to remove the flywheel so I used a fine mineral oil delivered to the shaft by way of placing a toothpick as close to the shaft as I could get and applying a couple drops of oil to run down it.   I was able to remove the circlip and the pressure hub to apply oil there.  Afterwards, I let the drive motors run for 60-90 minutes.

One of the drives that came with the H17 was missing a motor controller board.  Fortunately Tom Wilson sent me a spare I was able to use.  Unfortunately, C9 was shorted and took out L1 with it (sound familiar?).  That drive also had a bad op-amp (LM319 at 5A) which I replaced.

I didn't have an alignment disk (the last time I did was in the '80s when I worked at Heathkit) so I created one using a known good 5.25" half height drive with a direct drive motor.  I wrote all zeros (000Q) to tracks 0, 2, 34 and all ones (377Q) to tracks 1, 3, 33.  I used it to verify alignment for each drive and would use other tracks to verify write/read operation of the drive under test.

I also made extensive use of my oscilloscope which I couldn't have found some of the problems without.  It also helped to have a known good drive to make comparison checks against.

Good luck to anyone else in repairing your drives!

BR,

Joe

BTW - If you would like to have the drive back Tom, I'd be happy to return it.

[norberto.collado koyado.com]

WOW! That is a lot of work to restore such drives.

 

From: se...@googlegroups.com <se...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Joe Travis N6YPC
Sent: Saturday, October 14, 2023 1:02 PM
To: SEBHC <se...@googlegroups.com>

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[glenn.f...@gmail.com]

This is great Joe. I’m actually on a similar mission. I’ve got a box of siemens drives of various vintage and provenance. I want them working if possible. Some of them belong with H89s, which I’d also like to get working. One goal is to get my 3-drive H17 cabinet working (with three good drives). With encouragement from  you and Dave McGuire I’m convinced these can be brought back to life.  I’ll be climbing a learning curve and may tap your brain for advice along the way, but your email is a great start!  Most of these I’ve already done the easy stuff on (e.g. cleaning up the bearings).

 

Right now just setting up my testbed system. I plan to boot from SVD (SY0: and SY1: ) with the Drive Under Test as SY2:.  I also plan to use XRSIZR (thanks Terry!)

 

Congrat’s!

 

• Glenn

 

 

From: se...@googlegroups.com <se...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Joe Travis N6YPC
Sent: Saturday, October 14, 2023 4:02 PM
To: SEBHC <se...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [sebhc] Re: SIEMENS FDD 100-5

 

Thank you very much Tom Wilson for the floppy drive and spare boards.  Thank you Terry Smedley for the XRSIZR software.  And thank you Curt Mayer for the H17 3-drive system.

--

[Tom Wilson]

Fantastic!

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[glenn.f...@gmail.com]

I went through some of my H17 drives today and just want to echo what joe said – the main problems, by far, that I have encountered are mechanical not electrical.  You need to do a fair amount of disassembly, cleaning and lubrication but so far I’m having great results. I have three fully functional drives (definition: passes the 3-pass TEST17 general drive checkout) and a fourth one under test that’s so far doing great (fingers crossed). I have two drives that will need further attention but I think one of them just needs the stepper/worm mechanism cleaned and lubricated….

 

I imagine I’ll encounter some electrical issues at some point but so far cleanup is getting me great results….

 

I’m always moaning here about my woes with floppy drives, maybe I should have practiced better disk drive hygiene…  anyway glad to be able to post something positive in that regard.

 

Hope to have the 3-drive H17 cabinet (from Ben) operational before too long…

 

 

• Glenn

[glenn.f...@gmail.com]

Well, it looks nice anyway:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                    

This is the 3-drive H17 chassis. Over the weekend I cleaned and tested the three drives (Siemens FDD 100-5) and all passed the 3-pass TEST17 test so I considered them “good drives”.  Well of course that was the jinx.  When I assembled the whole system I now can’t get the center drive (SY1: ) to read or format disks.  So I’ll be doing some more troubleshooting.

 

Looks nice though.  The 3-Drive setup is much more professional looking than the original.  But that 80’s boxer fan’s probably gotta go.  Need some 21st century cooling technology there… I’m hoping there’s a much quieter drop-in replacement?

 

These pix and more are in my google album on this restoration:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/gDQZdBAXXbchrLum6

 

-          Glenn

 

 

 

 

 

From: glenn.f...@gmail.com <glenn.f...@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 14, 2023 4:37 PM
To: se...@googlegroups.com

[Joseph Travis]

In hotrod parlance, it looks like a "sleeper" (stock appearance with a race motor under the hood).  I like it!

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sebhc/000001da0094%240ddbcf40%2429936dc0%24%40gmail.com.

[norberto.collado koyado.com]

Beautiful setup!

 

Norberto

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sebhc/CAGQDgBBCtw_y%2Bozq9mQzBN2qAzbo_pzRPsq9VEtH2v_weq_rdA%40mail.gmail.com.

[glenn.f...@gmail.com]

I swapped out the middle drive and now all three are working. Wonder how long that’ll last?

 

Can’t decide if these old fans have gotten noisier over the years or if we really tolerated that kind of noise level back in the 80s. I think the latter.  I know my Z100 always made quite a racket.

 

I’ll plan to swap out the fan for a modern quiet one…

 

• Glenn

 

 

From: se...@googlegroups.com <se...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Joseph Travis
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2023 9:35 PM
To: se...@googlegroups.com

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sebhc/CAGQDgBBCtw_y%2Bozq9mQzBN2qAzbo_pzRPsq9VEtH2v_weq_rdA%40mail.gmail.com.