A couple years ago I bought a 512k with a non-working HyperDrive 20 internal HD. On first inspection it was obvious a component on the MiniScribe 8425 controller board had failed and damaged the board. I found a replacement drive, sold as working, but the new drive also showed no signs of life. I was pretty confident the drive was good, I bought it from someone who sent me photos of it mounted on their Amiga. Next I turned to the HyperDrive controller board. With some help from @JDW we determined the controller board had likely failed.
I started a search for a replacement board, this is not a common item so I wasn't holding out hope. Finally a controller board out of a Plus showed up on eBay, the controller came with the Plus logic board as well. I was not 100% sure the Plus controller would work on a 512k, and definitely was not sure it was functional, but took a chance. I installed the controller yesterday and was pretty amazed when the HyperDrive utility successfully found the board and was able to format the drive. I now have a fully working 512ke HyperDrive. I was considering selling it with the non-functional HyperDrive (fully disclosing the condition), I'm glad I held out.
I had looked at the serial number and knew the machine started life as a 128k. When I was first looking around inside, I assumed it had previously received a 512ke logic board swap. As I looked more closely yesterday, I saw that the machine still retained its original 128k board and had been modified to have 512k of RAM. It also has the 128k ROMs, I assume from either a 512ke or Plus.
One odd item of note. When I first formatted the drive, the utility only formatted it as 10mb. There was no option or indication in the software it was doing this, I only noticed because the capacity showed as 10mb in Finder. This was odd since the drive was definitely a 20mb drive, and the board said HyperDrive 20 right on it. I re-initialized the drive and now it showed up as 20mb and seemed to mostly work fine, but certain programs would crash. I finally re-formatted the drive, and it was clear during the formatting process that the drive was now correctly recognized as 20mb. The formatting process has some visual progress meters showing which tracks and sectors it is working on, and the progress meters were twice as large this time around. After this I haven't had any crash issues.
The machine is not nearly as yellow as it looks in the photos, the backlighting made the photos difficult to see so I applied a filter to make the photos at least useable. The last photo is the original non-working controller, the photo prior to that is the working board out of a Plus. The screen is very bright and sharp, I just could not get a decent photo.
I started a search for a replacement board, this is not a common item so I wasn't holding out hope. Finally a controller board out of a Plus showed up on eBay, the controller came with the Plus logic board as well. I was not 100% sure the Plus controller would work on a 512k, and definitely was not sure it was functional, but took a chance. I installed the controller yesterday and was pretty amazed when the HyperDrive utility successfully found the board and was able to format the drive. I now have a fully working 512ke HyperDrive. I was considering selling it with the non-functional HyperDrive (fully disclosing the condition), I'm glad I held out.
I had looked at the serial number and knew the machine started life as a 128k. When I was first looking around inside, I assumed it had previously received a 512ke logic board swap. As I looked more closely yesterday, I saw that the machine still retained its original 128k board and had been modified to have 512k of RAM. It also has the 128k ROMs, I assume from either a 512ke or Plus.
One odd item of note. When I first formatted the drive, the utility only formatted it as 10mb. There was no option or indication in the software it was doing this, I only noticed because the capacity showed as 10mb in Finder. This was odd since the drive was definitely a 20mb drive, and the board said HyperDrive 20 right on it. I re-initialized the drive and now it showed up as 20mb and seemed to mostly work fine, but certain programs would crash. I finally re-formatted the drive, and it was clear during the formatting process that the drive was now correctly recognized as 20mb. The formatting process has some visual progress meters showing which tracks and sectors it is working on, and the progress meters were twice as large this time around. After this I haven't had any crash issues.
The machine is not nearly as yellow as it looks in the photos, the backlighting made the photos difficult to see so I applied a filter to make the photos at least useable. The last photo is the original non-working controller, the photo prior to that is the working board out of a Plus. The screen is very bright and sharp, I just could not get a decent photo.
