Hi,
I'm a vintage computer collector from Germany and new to this forum. Recently, I acquired some Apple II+/IIes and with them came a Xebec SASI host adapter and a huge hard disk. From browsing the web, I found that apparently Xebec sold kits consisting of the host adapter for an Apple II/II+/IIe plus an external controller PCB to turn a dumb MFM hard disk drive into a SASI HDD – at least I found a Xebec manual describing such a kit. Some German company probably called Rothahn seems to have used those kits together with a compartment and a huge full-height BASF 5 ¼” hard disk with whopping 21 MB to sell them as complete HDD stations for the Apple II – I even got a German manual for it.
Unfortunately, booting from this BASF HDD didn’t work out of the box so I have to assume that at least the data one that HDD might get corrupted over the last 40 year - or the drive is gone, although it still spins up. I’d like to try to revive the station by giving the BASF drive a low-level format or by replacing it with another working MFM drive (which I have) but I couldn’t find an image of the necessary Xebec utilities disk anywhere on the usual websites. According to the two manuals I have a disk version named “XEBEC Apple Pascal 1.1” for the Pascal OS as well as an equivalent utility disk version for DOS 3.3 and for CP/M 2.20B must have existed. If anyone out there would be able to provide images for one (or all at best) of those utility disks, I would be very happy indeed…
Xebec SASI controller utilities disk image for Apple II needed
January 10, 2023 - 7:20pm
#1
Xebec SASI controller utilities disk image for Apple II needed
Those drives were sold in the US under the brand name "Sider".
The disk images for the Sider utilities are on Asimov.
I happen to have one of the 20MB Sider hard drives in working condition. I was trying to sell it but nobody wants to pay anything for one.
Hi,
can you please post pictures of your controller and hdd? I wish that you please can check my preceding post and tell me if you recognize my xebec controllers..
https://www.applefritter.com/content/xebec-apple-23-board
thank you
Luca
I knew that those Xebec host adapters were also used by the Sider HDDs - but from want I found out, they were apparently using a different ROM on the host adapter for each hard disk type the system was shipped with the drive geometry in that ROM. I found the Sider manuals on the web and from what I saw there, the Sider tools read out that information from the ROM and it isn't possible to use those tools to format and partition a drive with a different geometry, while the original Xebec tools (that I'm searching for) allowed to enter an arbitrary drive geometry with cylinders and heads according to the manuals I have (a bit like in old PCs were IBM initially only supported a fixed number of geometries until later BIOS versions allowed to enter arbitrary HDD geometries). Actually my plan B is to convert my system into a Sider from a software perspective by exchanging the ROM on my host adapter with an EPROM burned with a Sider ROM image (that I also have to find first) for a drive with equal or smaller geometry values than the BASF drive that I have here and to use the Sider tools to format it afterwards...
Sorry, I still have to find out how to embed some images into my posts here - I've uploaded a photo of my host adapter to the files section and it looks different from yours. Mine is an Assy No. 103916 Rev. C...