A TALE OF WOE¢-------------¢¢Article by Richard Gore¢¢¢As you may know, the XF551 was Atari's last disk drive to be designed and manufactured for use with their 8-bit ran=ge of computers. Now this drive has been derided by many people, unfairly in my opinion. It is in fact much quieter in operation than the 1050, and is also capable of true double density without any modification. It is true that some software (mainly DataByte's disk games) will not load on a 551 due to its 300rpm rotation rate whereas the 1050 (and 810?) rotate at 288rpm but this is only a minor irritation. There are also several bugs in the drive's Operating system, such as the improper density switching, this is especially prevalent when copying disks using MyCopyR, for instance if you copy a disk in enhanced density using your 551 as the source drive and another drive as the destination drive and then copy a second disk but this disk happens to be single density the 551 will still think it is reading an enhanced density disk, which will result in an error when it tries to read above sector 720. The solution to this problem is very simple, just get a directory of the source disk in the 551 immediately before you start to copy the disk. However there are now several upgrades available from CSS in the States (and Derek Fern in the UK) that eliminate these and a few other minor problems. When used with the correct DOS (MyDOS, SuperDOS, SpartaDOS etc) the 551 can give 360k of data per disk without you having to physically flip the disk over. This is ideal for storing large BASIC type in games or for UNARCing PD software, indeed I regularly did this. Then one fateful day I booted one of these disks but to my horror it crashed out on me soon after boot up, after several retries I thought okay the disk must be corrupted and tried another disk, this worked fine, panic over, one faulty disk with a few BASIC programs on I can handle. However the second disk I tried was a single sided disk and when I tried to boot another double sided disk I got the same problem, aaarrrrggghhh! I booted SuperDOS and tried to format a blank disk in double density double sided format, the first side formatted okay but the second side wouldn't format, the same applied when I retried using MyDOS and several other blank disks. I came to the conclusion that side 2 of my drive had died but side 1 still worked fine (well 99% of the time). During a long phone call to a friend of mine (who just happens to run a large PD library and an on-disk newsletter [Mmmm.....I know this guy! - Ed.]) it was suggested the drive mechanism is just a standard PC one and thus buying one and replacing my original one should solve the problem. After a scan through Micro Mart, I spotted a 360k mech for 10pounds plus VAT plus postage (that makes about 17pounds) which is not a bad price especially if it fixed my XF551, although it's nearly double the 10pounds advertised. Apparently it was cheap because 5.25 inch drives are no longer desirable in the PC world. Well onto the phone with credit card in hand and a few days later the parcel arrived. Upon opening it up things looked good, all the connectors appeared to be the same as my original, even though the new mech was a bit bigger. However it didn't work, I connected everything up but to no avail, the LED didn't light and the drive just kept on spinning until I turned the power off. Feeling extremely depressed I phoned another of my contacts (somebody who sells lots and lots of commercial software), he suggested that just because the connectors looked the same it doesn't mean to say they are connected the same way round, which sounds very much like an Atari policy, he suggested I tried connecting the cables the other way round, this is hard because the IDC connector has a locating bar so it can only be connected one way round. I therefore got my soldering iron out and built my own cable, hacked apart my 551 IDC cable housing and connected everything up and guess what, did it work, well no it didn't. By this time I was desparate and it suddenly entered my head what happens if the new mechanism is faulty? Well, onto the phone once again to the company who sold me the mech, they seemed to know very little about a great many things. Now the mech was sold as tested and working, but all they could suggest was 'well it might be faulty. Pop it back too us and we'll have a look at it.' After forking out another three pounds to post it back to them, I waited and waited. About three weeks later I got a letter saying the mech works perfectly send us another five pounds so we can send it back to you. Back onto the phone to try to get my money back, after all it may work for them but it's certainly no use for me. Well guess what, they refused to give me my money back. I'm an easy going person, not much makes me angry but they did. At the bottom of their advert is a small paragraph saying stock taken back is subject to a 20% re-stocking fee, now that seems fair enough to me, and I pointed this out to them but still they wouldn't give me any money back, pointing out it says 'IF we take the goods back'. By this time I was really rather angry, the guy on the phone had a really cocky attitude, after all they had me by *****, they had my mech that I had paid for and wouldn't give me a refund and they wanted another fiver to send it back to me. I nearly told them where to shove the drive but I just resisted and had no choice but to once again hand over my credit card number.¢¢By the time I got the mechanism back it had cost me over 25pounds, a far cry from the 10pounds price originally advertised and I still haven't got a working fully working XF551. The moral of this story is, don't believe everything you're told, read the fine print, watch for hidden charges and don't buy anything from First Surplus of Bedford Road, Wootton, Bedford unless you know that it will definitley work in the situation you have planned for it.¢¢Now you know the background I hope somebody can help me with my problem. Does anybody definitely know how to repair my 551 or know whether the mechanisms in the 551's are industry standard? I would even consider purchasing another mechanism so long as it is a direct replacement for the Mitsumi mechs in the 551's and it is guaranteed to work. Alternatively could the problem be in another part of the drive? Could the OS have become corrupted? Can anybody help me, please.¢¢My address is Richard Gore, 79 SPROTBROUGH ROAD, SPROTBROUGH, DONCASTER, DN5 8BW, ENGLAND.¢¢¢E-mail RG9@UK.AC.YORK.VAXB¢ (after 10th of October)¢
