Intro and 9133D HDD

[JvZ]

MY first post here.

Been collecting a number of old HP computers and currently have 3 x 150s, 4 x 85s, 2 x 86s and a few HP-UX systems (712, 715, etc.). Started the restore on the 150s the last 2 weeks.

Also have a 9121D, 9122D and 9133D. (Also 3 x 9123s but don't have an 150II yet.) All the floppies required disassembly to clean and they all are now working except Drive B in the 9122.

My question is on the 9133D. The fault light stays on permanently, even though the floppy works and I can read and write to it from the 150. From the diags and tests it seems the ST-419 HDD is faulty, though it spins up and attempts a format.

Any ideas if I can drop in a "more modern" ST-506 drive (such as a ST-225) in this unit? I read what documentation I could find, but did not see anything.

Or, potentially, any ideas on resurrecting the ST-419?

Any help will be appreciated!

[rprosperi]

ST-251 drives will definitely work, and they're fairly readily available, though most on eBay are "as-is", so it can be a gamble. In my case, I use it with an HP-87XM so any Series-80 machines will definitely work (with the proper EMS ROM), and I suspect it will also work (w/different formatting) for the 150's, but no idea at all about the HP-UX machines.

hth

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

Any ST-506 drive that has as least as many heads, tracks and sectors/track as the drive you are replacing will likely work, but with the available capacity of the original drive. I replaced the drive in a 9133 model L (40MB) with as Miniscribe 3085 (85MB) and it worked fine but only 40MB of the disk was available.

[JvZ]

Thanks for the replies so far!

I tried a 225 and a 251 from my collection but they did not work immediately. Suspect I need to tweak a few things.

At one point I spun the spindle motor of the 419 by hand and then it started up. Amazingly it booted fine and I could make a full backup On the drive is DOS, Windows, Word, Lotus, an accounting package and a few other apps. All working and taking up a massive 9MB!

But, I suspect, the 419 might die again, so still keen to plug in another HDD.

[Dave Frederickson]

My 9133D came equipped with a ST-225. I found an MFM ISA controller on eBay and installed the drive in my vintage PC. This allowed me to run SpinRite, reformat the drive to 20MB, and reconfigure the 9133 as an "H".

Dave

[rprosperi]

There is a wealth of documentation for the 9133 on the HP Computer Museum, just search for "9133". Among those, the "9133-9134 CE Handbook" (and probably others too) include details of jumpers/dip-switches (section III) on the main board which you use to specify the parameters of the hard drive you install, based on the S/N of your drive. It doesn't really say explicitly that one must set these to adapt a new or different hard drive, as HP probably never anticipated owners would be installing their own drives, but I could not get the 251 drive I installed working properly until adjusting these to reflect the drive I installed.

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

(10-20-2019 03:48 PM)JvZ Wrote:  Thanks for the replies so far!

I tried a 225 and a 251 from my collection but they did not work immediately. Suspect I need to tweak a few things.

At one point I spun the spindle motor of the 419 by hand and then it started up. Amazingly it booted fine and I could make a full backup On the drive is DOS, Windows, Word, Lotus, an accounting package and a few other apps. All working and taking up a massive 9MB!

But, I suspect, the 419 might die again, so still keen to plug in another HDD.

The 225 will not work as it has less heads 4 instead of 6, the 251 should work if it spins up ok, the half high Seagates of that vintage had a nasty habit of the heads sticking to the platters. You will need to initialize the drive as well as the 9133 uses 256 bytes/sector and if the drive was previously installed in a PC it will be formatted 512 bytes/sector. Also if you use a larger drive you can increase the capacity of the drive by changing the model jumpers on the controller card, jumper settings are documented in the service manual which is available at hpmuseum.net. Your 225 might work if you change the model jumpers to be a 'H' as the specs for the 20MB 'H' listed in the manual indicate it is a 4 head drive. The drive used in the 40MB Model 'L' would appear to be 256 bytes/sector, 32 sectors/track 977 tracks/surface and 5 surfaces (heads)

Paul.

Paul.

[JvZ]

(10-21-2019 02:35 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  There is a wealth of documentation for the 9133 on the HP Computer Museum, just search for "9133". Among those, the "9133-9134 CE Handbook" (and probably others too) include details of jumpers/dip-switches (section III) on the main board which you use to specify the parameters of the hard drive you install, based on the S/N of your drive. It doesn't really say explicitly that one must set these to adapt a new or different hard drive, as HP probably never anticipated owners would be installing their own drives, but I could not get the 251 drive I installed working properly until adjusting these to reflect the drive I installed.

(10-21-2019 03:02 AM)Paul Berger (Canada) Wrote:  The 225 will not work as it has less heads 4 instead of 6, the 251 should work if it spins up ok, the half high Seagates of that vintage had a nasty habit of the heads sticking to the platters. You will need to initialize the drive as well as the 9133 uses 256 bytes/sector and if the drive was previously installed in a PC it will be formatted 512 bytes/sector. Also if you use a larger drive you can increase the capacity of the drive by changing the model jumpers on the controller card, jumper settings are documented in the service manual which is available at hpmuseum.net. Your 225 might work if you change the model jumpers to be a 'H' as the specs for the 20MB 'H' listed in the manual indicate it is a 4 head drive. The drive used in the 40MB Model 'L' would appear to be 256 bytes/sector, 32 sectors/track 977 tracks/surface and 5 surfaces (heads)

Paul.

Thanks for all the replies so far!

Weekend again, so will look further at this. I did read all the manuals on this unit and on the 4-jumper block on the control board of the 9133D (Rev C) and can see they clearly manage certain parameters. Currently they're in the position I marked in red. But I've not quite figured out what each jumper does.

Got another 2 x HP-150 to tackle today and then want to start with the HP-85s and HP-86s (whole new world for me!)

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

Those jumpers specify what model of 9133 it is, and the difference between the models D, H, and L is the size of the drive installed, which seems very likely to amount to it change the drive geometry expected. The service guide also lists the specs for the drive used in each model and by comparing that to the specs of the drive you have in hand you can determine if the drive you have is suitable. The only requirement is that the drive you want to use has at least as many heads, tracks and sectors / track as the drive you are replacing. Keep in mind that when you read the specs for a drive the sectors / track will usually be in 512 byte sectors while some HP devices of this era used 256 byte sectors, so it can probably fit twice as many 256 byte sectors as 512 or at worst 2x-1 since there is some overhead for each sector. The ST-506 is not a smart interface and just moves the head comb from cylinder to cylinder based on pulses on the step line and the current state of direction line, and head is selected by the binary count presented on the 4 head select lines. There is no way for the controller to know what drive model is on the end of the cable, unlike a smart interface like SCSI where the controller can interrogate to device to find out what it is.

Paul.

[rprosperi]

(10-26-2019 02:17 PM)JvZ Wrote:  I did read all the manuals on this unit and on the 4-jumper block on the control board of the 9133D (Rev C) and can see they clearly manage certain parameters. Currently they're in the position I marked in red. But I've not quite figured out what each jumper does.

The 2 upper sections (w/4 items each) of entries in that table are for 15MB drives (used capacity in the 9133, actual drive size could be larger) while the 2 lower sections are for 20MB drives.

Although my drive came with a different setting when I got it, I found that an ST-251 drive works fine with the same setting you highlighted (Rev. C, settings EFCD).

The ST-251 drive itself can be formatted to hold over 40MB, but when installed as described here, it is only seen as 15MB of storage.

Other drives can and do work, but since 15MB is likely more than enough (at least for Series-80 with the flat file structure) I recommend the ST-251 since they are still fairly available, and tend to be quite reliable. Most of all, they're cheap, I got mine for $28.

[JvZ]

(10-26-2019 11:05 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  

(10-26-2019 02:17 PM)JvZ Wrote:  I did read all the manuals on this unit and on the 4-jumper block on the control board of the 9133D (Rev C) and can see they clearly manage certain parameters. Currently they're in the position I marked in red. But I've not quite figured out what each jumper does.

The 2 upper sections (w/4 items each) of entries in that table are for 15MB drives (used capacity in the 9133, actual drive size could be larger) while the 2 lower sections are for 20MB drives.

Although my drive came with a different setting when I got it, I found that an ST-251 drive works fine with the same setting you highlighted (Rev. C, settings EFCD).

The ST-251 drive itself can be formatted to hold over 40MB, but when installed as described here, it is only seen as 15MB of storage.

Other drives can and do work, but since 15MB is likely more than enough (at least for Series-80 with the flat file structure) I recommend the ST-251 since they are still fairly available, and tend to be quite reliable. Most of all, they're cheap, I got mine for $28.

Thanks! I do have quite a few ST-251's lying around, so will definitely try one. Agree 15MB is more than enough. And it'll sound pretty cool, few drives have that iconic 251 startup sound.

Noob question; how does one do a low-level format on it? I assume formatting from DOS on the 150 expects the disk to have already been low-level formatted?

[toml_12953]

(10-27-2019 07:27 AM)JvZ Wrote:  

(10-26-2019 11:05 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  The 2 upper sections (w/4 items each) of entries in that table are for 15MB drives (used capacity in the 9133, actual drive size could be larger) while the 2 lower sections are for 20MB drives.

Although my drive came with a different setting when I got it, I found that an ST-251 drive works fine with the same setting you highlighted (Rev. C, settings EFCD).

The ST-251 drive itself can be formatted to hold over 40MB, but when installed as described here, it is only seen as 15MB of storage.

Other drives can and do work, but since 15MB is likely more than enough (at least for Series-80 with the flat file structure) I recommend the ST-251 since they are still fairly available, and tend to be quite reliable. Most of all, they're cheap, I got mine for $28.

Thanks! I do have quite a few ST-251's lying around, so will definitely try one. Agree 15MB is more than enough. And it'll sound pretty cool, few drives have that iconic 251 startup sound.

Noob question; how does one do a low-level format on it? I assume formatting from DOS on the 150 expects the disk to have already been low-level formatted?

If you can connect it to a machine running MS-DOS, you can run debug and enter

G=C800:5

The low-level format program is built-in.

[JvZ]

(10-27-2019 10:29 AM)toml_12953 Wrote:  

(10-27-2019 07:27 AM)JvZ Wrote:  Thanks! I do have quite a few ST-251's lying around, so will definitely try one. Agree 15MB is more than enough. And it'll sound pretty cool, few drives have that iconic 251 startup sound.

Noob question; how does one do a low-level format on it? I assume formatting from DOS on the 150 expects the disk to have already been low-level formatted?

If you can connect it to a machine running MS-DOS, you can run debug and enter

G=C800:5

The low-level format program is built-in.

But will that format it correctly for this system? Seems the bytes per sector is different?

[JvZ]

Pulled the other two HP-150's out the store but they both have significant battery corrosion. Have cleaned them as much as possible but will send them to an ultrasonic bath tomorrow before I try and start them up.
.
I wonder what percentage of perfectly fine vintage computers have been destroyed by batteries.
.
   
   
   
   
   

[rprosperi]

The manual "9133H_UsingYourDiscDrive_09133-90071_32pages_Mar85.pdf" available at the HP Computer Museum has instructions on how to prepare and format the disk using an HP-150 on pages 2-1 through 2-6.

I only use my drive with Series-80, so can't comment on the accuracy of the procedure, though I do recall that (on S80 at least) the format took longer than I expected, so be patient.

[JvZ]

(10-27-2019 02:15 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  The manual "9133H_UsingYourDiscDrive_09133-90071_32pages_Mar85.pdf" available at the HP Computer Museum has instructions on how to prepare and format the disk using an HP-150 on pages 2-1 through 2-6.

I only use my drive with Series-80, so can't comment on the accuracy of the procedure, though I do recall that (on S80 at least) the format took longer than I expected, so be patient.

Thanks, off to read it again. I read everything I could find on the site for this drive but clearly missed or can't recall it!

[JvZ]

(10-27-2019 02:28 PM)JvZ Wrote:  

(10-27-2019 02:15 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  The manual "9133H_UsingYourDiscDrive_09133-90071_32pages_Mar85.pdf" available at the HP Computer Museum has instructions on how to prepare and format the disk using an HP-150 on pages 2-1 through 2-6.

I only use my drive with Series-80, so can't comment on the accuracy of the procedure, though I do recall that (on S80 at least) the format took longer than I expected, so be patient.

Thanks, off to read it again. I read everything I could find on the site for this drive but clearly missed or can't recall it!

Ah, OK. So it's just the normal DOS format. Tx!

[JvZ]

As you would've read above, I'm busy restoring three HP-150s.

Good news is that all 3 are working......but.....

Bad news is that, on 2 of them, the video boards are dead....the dreaded leaking-battery problem, I'm sure. Both had bad leakage. I cleaned them as much as possible and then they went into an ultrasonic bath to clean out all the corrosion under the chips, etc.

Still dead, unfortunately. So I'll try and find corroded tracks (nothing visual, so far) and see if I can bring them back to life.

Any case; my question;

Do we know;

1. Someone who can repair these boards down to component level? (I'm OK with component level repair, myself, but these boards are not easy to get to while switched on, I assume you need a special rig.)

2. A source for these boards? It's burns my butt-hole that I have two "working" systems that I can't put back into the collector community......happy to buy two working boards.