Date   : Sat, 21 Jan 2006 19:55:05 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: eBay What is this?

Ian Wolstenholme wrote:
> It's arrived and it is a Xebec S1410 controller with NEC D3126 Winchester
> disc drive.  See here for information on the controller:
> 
> http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/SASI/XEBEC.htm
> 
> It all appears to be in good working order but I haven't been able to
> read anything off the drive. 

If it is indeed a drive that went with the Cumana 68008 board then it'll have 
an OS-9 filesystem on it - you won't be able to read it natively without 
either a Cumana board or another OS-9 system (the filesystem format I believe 
is standardised for all OS-9 systems, so any OS-9 machine should be able to 
make sense of it)

> Can anyone suggest another way of reading the disc or is it safe to
> assume that there is no data on it?

There's possibly some very interesting data on it, given that Cumana boards 
are extremely rare and would likely have only been used in specialist 
applications.

If you can get a raw disk image to me it'd be much appreciated (unfortunately 
the necessary BBC BASIC commands to get such an image is beyond me!) - I've 
got a Cumana board here (but so far have been unable to figure out how to set 
the drive geometry in its NVRAM, so I'm not quite at the point where I can 
just plug in a drive and go!)

Or possibly if what you're really hoping for is a good ADFS-formatted drive 
for a beeb I may be able to locate one and we could do a swap...

> Is there a formatter for use with the Xebec board?

I've not seen one, only ones that expect to use Adaptec bridge boards.

I've got the Xebec manual here - it uses SCSI command 0x0C to set the drive 
geometry (the equivalent OMTI board uses 0xC2, and unfortunately I don't know 
where I've put my Adaptec board manual to check what it does)

cheers

Jules