Olivetti OD-810

[waynestewart]

I picked up an Olivetti OD-810 drive with some cartridges and have been trying to get it working with something. I don’t have an install disk or software. Anyone have any knowledge of this drive?

I tried with several Macs and either they can’t see it or they hang.

On the Apple II the Apple SCSI cards see it but give a SCSI error while trying to format. With the Ramfast I see the drives make and drive size in the utility but formatting fails

 

[saybur]

Neat find! If it's a WORM drive some of the information here might point to useful software. If you want to take some pictures you might be the first person to document it online, I couldn't find hardly anything apart from references to Laserdisk (later "Literal") making the equipment.

 

[waynestewart]

I can’t find anything online except an advertising pic. In the pic it appears to be connected to what I think is an Olivetti 286.

I solved one issue. I could see it on my Apple IIs but got a SCSI error trying to format but couldn’t see it on a Mac or the Mac would hang at boot up. This morning it occurred to me that maybe it was the SCSI cable. I was using a different cable on the Apple II and the one it came with on the Mac. Swapped out the Mac cable and now there’s no hangs and the SCSI utilities sees the drive. However when I try to format the utility says the disks are write protected. They aren't so faulty write protect switch?

 

[saybur]

I'd assume the SCSI commands are going to be quirky with write-once media, especially during formatting. It may require one of those special backup packages referenced in the other thread.

 

[waynestewart]

I don't think it's write once media. The disks have write protect switches for each side. To me it looks like a version of MO.
Hopefully I can find some time to do a disassembly and find the write protect switch.

 

[saybur]

That looks amazing, what a chonky beast.

If you can get the response from an INQUIRY command it should indicate whether it is write-only or not, there is a device type flag in there (assuming it is standards-compliant). SCSI Probe should show that information. There is another classic Mac tool that can just give the full response as well, but I’m away from my systems and the name escapes me; if you have access to a Linux box sg_inq in the sg3_utils can do it too.