electricmonk
Active member
Hi all,
I cannibalised an HDI-20 floppy drive and created an adapter for my Floppy Emu using an IDC-20 breakout board. Here's a photo:
I'm having the weirdest problem though: it can only mount the 800kb and 400kb disk images, not the 1.44mb images. The HD20 hard drive image mounts fine, but 1.44mb floppy images it claims are unreadable and wants to format. Bizarre. I've had issues with this Powerbook 100 reading floppies before and I just assumed that my two HDI-20 floppy drives were both damaged. I never had an 800kb floppy to test...
I also don't have another Powerbook 100 or Duo with an HDI-20 floppy port to test.
I feel like these Powerbooks and these disk drives used to be able to use 1.44mb floppies so I feel like it might be this particular Powerbook - which is a pity as I have recapped it, made a new lithium battery for it and even replaced the fluorescent bulb in the screen. Maybe I need to get hold of another logic board, or catch up with someone who has a Duo or another Powerbook 100 to test this with.
Anyway, if anyone else wants to do what I did it's really easy. All the HDI-20 pinout diagrams online are backwards which is annoying. This is an accurate diagram. In case it's not clear the dark spots are where the missing pins on the HDI-20 plug are. They correspond to the pins on the IDC-20 which are evidently not needed for the HDI-20 drive: -12V, +12V and PWM. You don't use the IDC-20 pin numbers, you go 1-10 down the left side and then 11-20 down the right side. The dark spots for the missing pins should make this clear.
Here is the pinout info which can be compared to the diagram above:
I cannibalised an HDI-20 floppy drive and created an adapter for my Floppy Emu using an IDC-20 breakout board. Here's a photo:
I'm having the weirdest problem though: it can only mount the 800kb and 400kb disk images, not the 1.44mb images. The HD20 hard drive image mounts fine, but 1.44mb floppy images it claims are unreadable and wants to format. Bizarre. I've had issues with this Powerbook 100 reading floppies before and I just assumed that my two HDI-20 floppy drives were both damaged. I never had an 800kb floppy to test...
I also don't have another Powerbook 100 or Duo with an HDI-20 floppy port to test.
I feel like these Powerbooks and these disk drives used to be able to use 1.44mb floppies so I feel like it might be this particular Powerbook - which is a pity as I have recapped it, made a new lithium battery for it and even replaced the fluorescent bulb in the screen. Maybe I need to get hold of another logic board, or catch up with someone who has a Duo or another Powerbook 100 to test this with.
Anyway, if anyone else wants to do what I did it's really easy. All the HDI-20 pinout diagrams online are backwards which is annoying. This is an accurate diagram. In case it's not clear the dark spots are where the missing pins on the HDI-20 plug are. They correspond to the pins on the IDC-20 which are evidently not needed for the HDI-20 drive: -12V, +12V and PWM. You don't use the IDC-20 pin numbers, you go 1-10 down the left side and then 11-20 down the right side. The dark spots for the missing pins should make this clear.
Here is the pinout info which can be compared to the diagram above:
Last edited: