[Techtoolslist] Gotek w/ FlashFloppy and github service disk problems

[Tim Matthews]

Hi all,

I wanted to report back to say this is now working fine, and give a few
tips for anyone trying this in the future.

First of all, many, many thanks to Tony Jones who gave me a bunch of help
off-list, without which I would still be stuck.

Key points:

1. Having the drive type set to Sony in firmware, *or* having pin14 in the
floppy cable grounded is crucial (you can also have both setup if you're
not sure what your firmware value is). There is mention of this on the
various web pages, and in Tony's emails, but I missed it and that's what
held me up. The Gotek just will not work without this. If the Gotek shows a
few tracks of activity at each boot attempt, you've missed this setting ;)

2. I am using a Stratos AZTECMONSTER CF-SCSI card and the onboard drive
activity LED on mine doesn't reflect the true state. It pulses when the
Fluke self-test completes and the 9100 is looking for disks, but it shows
no activity whilst formatting or booting from the CF. Don't assume nothing
is happening because the LED is dark.

3. I tried to convert the github stream files to an img with keirf's
disk-analyse tools from his Disk Utilities[0] repo. I built them on MacOS
Catalina and execution appeared fine but the output file was always zero
bytes. I did some debugging with dtruss and modified the code a bit, but
couldn't find any reason why the output was empty. It's possible the OS SIP
is doing weird stuff, but I don't have time to chase this down to facts. I
tried a few other methods to create usable images from the stream and
different techniques produced differing output!

    Hopefully Tony's suggestion of having hfe files being generated by the
github Makefile will be implemented, but in the interim the proper SHA1
checksum for the service1.4 hfe is 3c638ee28b5421267ed9dfbc71f3b5ec670f8093
SERVICE-V1.4__01-OG.hfe

4. The Gotek is an absolutely wonderful device, and anybody still using the
FDD should look at getting one :) They can be found for about £15 and once
flashed with keirf's flashfloppy[1] they are very easy to use. The wiki
instructions on USB flashing[2] are simple to complete. If you have
problems getting the device identified by Windows as DFU-able try
connecting the gotek with both buttons held in. On Windows10 you'll know
it's been picked up when you get an OS warning about a non-working USB
device detected and it will now be visible in the DFU tool. In default mode
FlashFloppy assigns images to drive numbers by a strict alphanumeric sort
of the filename, e.g files placed on the USB: copy.img, disk1a.img,
disk2a.img will be in slots 0, 1, 2 on the Gotek.

5. The v6.1 OS image provided by Andy Wellburn at his website[3] is
excellent. I was a bit surprised that I wasn't asked for any drive geometry
details other than sector size when setting up the SCSI drive on the Fluke,
but it works. I wrote the 64MB image to the first quarter of a 256MB CF via
dd and it's fine.

Thanks for everybody who has contributed to the list archives, I found lots
of helpful info there too.

cheers,
tim

[0] https://github.com/keirf/Disk-Utilities
[1] https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy
[2] https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki/Firmware-Programming
[3] http://www.andysarcade.net/personal/tech/fluke9100/v6_1.rar

On Tue, 21 Jul 2020 at 00:08, Tim Matthews <trmatthe at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I am trying to resurrect a 9100 with dead HD and switch it to SCSI-CF. I
> have no way of creating a real system floppy so have installed a gotek,
> flashed it to FlashFloppy 2.14.
> [snip]
>
>