Odyssey Hard Drive - anyone try other brands?

[cfh]

I know the stock hard drive for the odyssey is a
SCSI Seagate Barracuda ST15150N model, 7200 rpm,
4.3 gig, 9ms, 50 pin. But has anyone ever tried a
different SCSI 50 pin hard drive? Or for that matter,
an IDE with an SCSI 50 pin adaptor?

[Slotmaster]

about 5 years ago I tried to get another drive to work and came up empty.

The limitation was SCSI controller but I did not try IDE to SCSI.

Way back when it was easy to get the original drives, I would guess now it's not.

That platform still has games that are better then today's machines to some degree.

[cfh]

i don't understand why another 50 pin SCSI drive
with perhaps larger capacity would not work.
what drives exactly did you try?

[Neonkiss]

I was speaking to friend in the industry on this topic just the other day after seeing this post.
He advised that he had also tried this a number of years ago but had no success. His thoughts were that there is something weird about the boot sector on the original drive preventing it from copying over to the new drive. He said he would like to try this again with some of the newer imaging copying software now available. It would have to be something that would copy and format bit for bit. Maybe along the line of the newer versions of Ghost.

Maybe RickHunter could elaborate further. He's real good with the computer stuff.

[blueridgeslots]

Actually the OEM Drive was a Quantum Viking, but the better one to use was the Barracuda, the Viking didn't go out on the floor, but they didn't lock when powered down from what I was told, and then when they were moved, well..... you needed a new one, once you put the Barracuda in you were good to go, my first dealing with the "Slotmaster" was on eBay buying a drive for one over 10 years ago, still have it today

[Slotmaster]

The viking was also much harder to find off the shelf then the Seagate as well at the time.

The issue of finding a replacement had to do with the controller, needed drive size and that it was a 50 PIN.  

When moving up in size the 50 PIN was no longer as things went to SCSI 3 which is a different controller and had different drivers for booting.  There is no way to update the controller drivers as they were hard coded in the boot software which was the big issue.  The system looks for one type of controller / brand (adaptec)

The issue I remmember at the time there were not many different brands of 4 GIG SCSI 50 PIN drives and you do not want do go down in size either due to what is needed to get all the games on one drive.     You also have to becareful not to change any files or add any thing that is foregin or the drive will fail auth after being on for a while. 

That is what I remember off the top of my head.  

[cfh]

So are you saying as long as it's a 50 pin SCSI drive,
pretty much any 4gig or larger driver will work?

[robertwinter]

I've never been able to get anything other than the ST15150N Barracudas to work.  I've tried larger drives (all manufacturers), similar size drives from other manufacturers, SCSI-2 and SCSI-3 drives with adapters to 50-pin.  Nothing else works.

It wouldn't surprise me if the BIOS did a check on the drive ID during bootup for verification.  Since the drives have RSA signatures all over them, I'm sure there are some other security measures in place as well.

[jay]

I have some PC imaging software at the office. On occasion we have had issues (power bump), people unplugging a machine while it is imaging just because it didn't have a monitor on it they assumed it was off etc. In any case the Hard Drive gets pooched and none of the standard tools will work on the drive.

To correct this problem I have downloaded a utility from the Segate web site that allows me to re initilize the drive and create a partition on it. If I try to use the tool on a differenct brand of hard drive it tells me no-go. So it is possible that the slot is doing the same sort of check as well.

One other thing to try is to download a utility called Gpart its a self booting CD (free) that allows you to size a partition to anything you want. I would first use it to determine the exact size/layout of a drive that works - then swapping it for a different brand / size run the utility and size it to be the exact same as the Baracuda and see if that moves you forward.

Good luck

[StatFreak]

I wonder if there is a way to access the bios of a drive and change the drive ID (MFR etc.)? From reading these posts, it seems to me that this might be the key to "fooling" the machine into accepting another drive.

[pinballjail]

I tried it with a SCSI to IDE adaptor and it didn't work. It came up with a write protect error. Seemd the SCSI drive has a jumper on it to activate the write protect. IDE drives have no such jumper as far as I know. Looks like the bios would have to be changed.

[ChuckBerg]

I tried it with a SCSI to IDE adaptor and it didn't work. It came up with a write protect error. Seemd the SCSI drive has a jumper on it to activate the write protect. IDE drives have no such jumper as far as I know. Looks like the bios would have to be changed.

You're right - IDE drives do not have the required write-protect jumper that SCSI drives have.  Family Feud slot machines were shipped with IDE drives, because by the time we added two more video cards we had no slots left for the SCSI controller.  To solve the write-protect problem, we built an adapter board that fit the 50-pin connector on the drive.  You can learn more at http://www.google.com/patents/US6823419.

[rickhunter]

Just to elaborate further on this topic, the reason other drives don't work is because of drive geometry.  Hard drives are logically assigned Cylinders, Heads and Sectors per track.  In the old days it was pretty straight forward, you could just multiply the 3 to get the total sectors and multiply that by 512 bytes (number of bytes per sector on hard drives) and get the total capacity.  You can see we have limitations in size on this spec, which is commonly called CHS.  The maximum size is 255 heads x 1024 cylinders and 63 sectors per track, giving you a maximum size of 8 Gbytes.  In secured environments, the drive's geometry becomes part of the security hash, so unless the drives have the same CHS numbers, your hash will fail during validation as the bigger drives have different drive geometry. 

[ChuckBerg]

Just to elaborate further on this topic, the reason other drives don't work is because of drive geometry.  Hard drives are logically assigned Cylinders, Heads and Sectors per track.  In the old days it was pretty straight forward, you could just multiply the 3 to get the total sectors and multiply that by 512 bytes (number of bytes per sector on hard drives) and get the total capacity.  You can see we have limitations in size on this spec, which is commonly called CHS.  The maximum size is 255 heads x 1024 cylinders and 63 sectors per track, giving you a maximum size of 8 Gbytes.  In secured environments, the drive's geometry becomes part of the security hash, so unless the drives have the same CHS numbers, your hash will fail during validation as the bigger drives have different drive geometry. 

Correct - the BIOS and disk driver are "hard-coded" to CHS formatting so no drive larger than 8GB will work.  However, while many things are included in the encryption of the drive content, this geometry is not.

[rickhunter]

I figured that on most secured environments, the drive geometry would be part of the security hash, it is so with WMS flash cards.  Learn something new every day I always say.

[pinballjail]

So would it possible to build one of these adapters now so we could use IDE drives ?

[Billythekid]

By the way I have some Odyssey parts I'm going to ebay soon. Including a Barracuda drive that I used in an Odyssey I used to own. It's been about 4 years but I think it's a RW superdrive. When I sold the machine more than likely I put the stock drive back in it. If Robert marked them in a special way I can check it.

What an experience having that Odyssey was, don't crack your touchscreen!!!! I got lucky finding a parts machine.

[vette6048]

Very interesting information on this topic. I own a Odyssey machine for 2 years now and I have been pretty lucky with a few minor problems. I have been able to purchase some extra parts for mine and so far she is still playing good for me. Once in a while the game I am playing will freeze up, so I have to shut down and restart and the game continues on from where it froze with no problems. I am thinking maybe the hard drive getting bad. I have extras but I can live with this minor issue. Always good to pick up some more info from fellow NLG members. Thanks again!!