I’m looking for the Apple II Utilities disk for the Quark Peripherals QC-10/20 hard drive. Hoping someone here either has it or might know where to find it.
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I got these images from an ebay seller who had a QC-10 listed some time ago. And I recently bought a QC-20 and was able to use the driver disk in here ok. Not sure the others disk are much use, i think they probably had some copy protection on them. Let us know how you go with this.
/Rob
Thanks, Rob.
I think the hard drive is toast but if I was to pick up a replacement drive I wasn't sure if I'd need the disk
What kind of controller card does that use?
Floppy disk controller oon a II or IIe or IIc & IIgs floppy port or Mac floppy port.
There's switches to set for the type of floppy port
Interesting. I'm assuming it has a DB19 connector then? Does that require a SmartPort card like a LiRON or will it work with the much more common Apple 5.25 Controller Card?
It came with 3 different cables.
One to connect to a Disk II card.
Another for a 19 pin floppy card, IIc or Mac
A third for an Apple III.
It also had a 19 pin connector to daisy-chain an Apple II floppy drive.
It came out before 3.5” controllers, IIc+ or IIgs so there’s no mention of them in the manual.
Very interesting. I remember seeing the ads for these back in the day but I never actually saw one in person. The only person I knew of that had one had a //c where there were very limited hard drive options.
It would be interesting to know how the drivers for it work and the protocol it uses, etc. Could be an interesting start for some other projects.
The hard drives that I know were used were 5.25” MFM. A 10mb Shugart 712 and a Seagate 20mb possibly a ST-251.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VkyE3xJqx3uAvWwOneqPb7R5OdZRyent/view?usp=sharing
Mine did not come with any cables so i had to hack up a 19pin cable to try it on a IIc.
I would be very interested if you could let me know the wiring for the AppleIII cable, i'm quite keen to try it on that.
And it does seem to predate smartport. Its using the RD/WR data lines to send and receive data like smartport cbus, but seems to be a different setup.
I don't think it was an ST-251, that is a 40MB drive. Back in the early 1990s I worked at a place that had a ton of AT&T (Ollivetti) PC 6300 boxes that had those drives in them. They weren't terribly reliable, I had to replace several of the during the time I worked there.
Probably was an ST-225, that was a 20MB drive that would have been out at that time.
I was just listing the cables from the manual. I only have the 19 pin cable unfortunately.
I recall seeing some adapters for sale for connecting an Apple II drive to an Apple III. Maybe one of those would work
You're probably right. I made a note of the ST-225 as a possible drive and for some reason decided to type ST-251
No worries, i'll have a go at making something up.
I was wondering if you knew which hard drives were in yours?
I had a look, it has an ST-225 in it.
Thanks.
I think that my chances of finding a replacement Shugart HD are close to zero but a ST-225 is findable. Only question is will a 20mb drive work in a 10mb enclosure.
I might find another brand of 10mb HD but will it work? 20 some years ago I did a lot of searching trying to find drives that would work with the Vulcan. I bought quite a few small drives to try out. At the time nobody wanted 20 or 40mb hard drives so I was only out $5 if they didn’t work. Most didn’t. Picking up drives online and trying them could be pretty pricey.
So I pulled the QC-10 apart to see about the likely hood of encountering problems if I try and replace the 10mb Shugart with a 20mb Seagate.
There’s two circuit boards in there. Attached to the drive is a Xebiac board and attached to that is a Quark board. The worrisome part is that Xebiac board has an EPROM.It may be coded with the specs for that drive.
There’s a couple of pics at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Ti7tLi_dm-ia2bldEWiLoz6jbKy-2j_3?usp=sharing
There are a few pictures of the boards from my QC20 in here. It looks like the rom is marked with the same number, so you might be lucky.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/ksa58k904wm7gcmw4t821/h?rlkey=l4pvj4gv6e6w5i584i4vm7772&dl=0
That's a very interesting setup. The Xebec board I believe is probably a SASI controller that takes SASI in and controls an MFM hard drive with an ST-506 type interface. The Quark card must be a converter that goes from a Smartport-like (but not compatible) protocol over the 20 pin cable to the 50 pin SASI interface. 3 different interfaces... can't possibly be the fastest thing in the world, but the bottleneck is probably the 20 pin interface anyway. The Xebec board looks very similar to what is in a Sider drive, although that plugs into a Xebec SASI controller card for the Apple II.
Was asking about a drive on a local retro computer site and someone suggested this
https://decromancer.ca/mfm-emulator/
Unfortunately they’re Out of Stock. Also they suggest copying a supplied image onto it. Theirs are way too large. I could copy an image of a pretty old 20mb drive onto it though. That’s if they make more of them of course. Wish I knew how long they'd been out of stock.