Messing around where I shouldn't have I was making my own cable for a Duo drive that I found at a garage sale without cable. Easy enough to make a cable but I could have made a mistake? Anyways let me tell you how this all went down and maybe you can tell me that my IIgs can be saved.
So I've been playing around with ADTPro the last couple days when I had time to sit down. I was making disks and what not. Well this morning I decided next on my list was getting that DUO drive that has been in a box for a month or so working. All it needed was a cable. I found the pin-out guide online and so I found a db25 double ended cable I have plenty of ( I have maybe 10 of these cables) and snipped off one end. Then I exposed all 25 wires and matched up the colors with the pin assignments. Then I took the DB19 end that I got from amazon and started soldering each wire where it goes.
Once I was done I connected it to the IIgs, turned it on, IN#2 - Control A - 14B and then started up ADT Pro on my PC and connected and started prodos quick boot. It booted up no problem and I then placed two blank 5.25 disks into the two drives and formatted them.
Initially drive B was giving me problems. It would say check disk or drive door. Then it would say disk write protected. Tried a few more times, rebooted and started everything over again and it all worked fine! I was able to format both disks from each drive and I copied over disk 1 and 2 of Conan halls of volta.
Considering that a success I got out my floppy EMU with daisy chainer.
I plugged the daisy chainer into the back of the iigs, plugged the floppy emu ribbon cable onto the top and the duo drive into the 19pin slot at the rear.
Booted up .. can not find start disk or whatever the language is. Oops, I had it in smartport unit 2 from a few days ago. Ok, put it back into smartport disk (floppy emu) and tried again.
Still would not boot up.
Ok, this is weird. Remove the duo and try again. Still does not find any device.
Hmm, ok remove the daisy chainer and go back to the regular 19pin to ribbon cable adapter it came with. (floppy emu).. Fire it up and still can not boot/find device. Ok now I am getting worried...
Thinking maybe I zapped the floppy emu, I flash the firmware to mac mode, put it on my mac and it worked fine!
Flash it back to Apple II
Ok maybe there is a bad smart0.po file. So I used my backup disk. Still no go.
I then put it into 3.5 800k mode, still will not boot/load any .dsk file Nothing happens at all. Says no device found.
BUT when I put the floppy EMU into 5.25" emu mode, it loads stuff just fine!
So as a sanity check I got my physical 5.25 drive (not the duo) and plugged that into my iigs. The disks I made boot fine.
So then I unplugged that one and put my 3.5 on there alone. No light comes on, no disk access, nothing. no device found.
BTW, I am turning it off and back on after I make these changes. Just so you understand I am not hot swapping anything.
Theory, my soldering job on the duo cable may have left a strand of a wire not tucked in and it may have shorted across a two pins and burned up the IWM chip in some way. Or at least in whatever way that prevents anything above the 5.25" drive controller from working.
It is like a slot issue or something. I checked the slots in control panel. They are correct and default.
Someone suggested a low battery can cause weird things to happen so I removed the battery. It tested at .3 volts. Not 3.0 volts but .3. Yikes.
I unplugged the machine and gave it 20 minutes without power and tried it again (not sure why I thought that would do anything) and still same result.
So I am guessing I am going to need a new IWM chip which is the square soldered on 344S0041B VTI chip.
So I've been playing around with ADTPro the last couple days when I had time to sit down. I was making disks and what not. Well this morning I decided next on my list was getting that DUO drive that has been in a box for a month or so working. All it needed was a cable. I found the pin-out guide online and so I found a db25 double ended cable I have plenty of ( I have maybe 10 of these cables) and snipped off one end. Then I exposed all 25 wires and matched up the colors with the pin assignments. Then I took the DB19 end that I got from amazon and started soldering each wire where it goes.
Once I was done I connected it to the IIgs, turned it on, IN#2 - Control A - 14B and then started up ADT Pro on my PC and connected and started prodos quick boot. It booted up no problem and I then placed two blank 5.25 disks into the two drives and formatted them.
Initially drive B was giving me problems. It would say check disk or drive door. Then it would say disk write protected. Tried a few more times, rebooted and started everything over again and it all worked fine! I was able to format both disks from each drive and I copied over disk 1 and 2 of Conan halls of volta.
Considering that a success I got out my floppy EMU with daisy chainer.
I plugged the daisy chainer into the back of the iigs, plugged the floppy emu ribbon cable onto the top and the duo drive into the 19pin slot at the rear.
Booted up .. can not find start disk or whatever the language is. Oops, I had it in smartport unit 2 from a few days ago. Ok, put it back into smartport disk (floppy emu) and tried again.
Still would not boot up.
Ok, this is weird. Remove the duo and try again. Still does not find any device.
Hmm, ok remove the daisy chainer and go back to the regular 19pin to ribbon cable adapter it came with. (floppy emu).. Fire it up and still can not boot/find device. Ok now I am getting worried...
Thinking maybe I zapped the floppy emu, I flash the firmware to mac mode, put it on my mac and it worked fine!
Flash it back to Apple II
Ok maybe there is a bad smart0.po file. So I used my backup disk. Still no go.
I then put it into 3.5 800k mode, still will not boot/load any .dsk file Nothing happens at all. Says no device found.
BUT when I put the floppy EMU into 5.25" emu mode, it loads stuff just fine!
So as a sanity check I got my physical 5.25 drive (not the duo) and plugged that into my iigs. The disks I made boot fine.
So then I unplugged that one and put my 3.5 on there alone. No light comes on, no disk access, nothing. no device found.
BTW, I am turning it off and back on after I make these changes. Just so you understand I am not hot swapping anything.
Theory, my soldering job on the duo cable may have left a strand of a wire not tucked in and it may have shorted across a two pins and burned up the IWM chip in some way. Or at least in whatever way that prevents anything above the 5.25" drive controller from working.
It is like a slot issue or something. I checked the slots in control panel. They are correct and default.
Someone suggested a low battery can cause weird things to happen so I removed the battery. It tested at .3 volts. Not 3.0 volts but .3. Yikes.
I unplugged the machine and gave it 20 minutes without power and tried it again (not sure why I thought that would do anything) and still same result.
So I am guessing I am going to need a new IWM chip which is the square soldered on 344S0041B VTI chip.