SCSI HDD Replacement

[pshoey]

Modern tech comes to our antique machines!!

Now it is possible to replace the SCSI drive with a new board that emulates SCSI devices from an SD card.

ZuluSCSI is able to do just that. It is an open source project.

Copy an image of the drive to an SD card and the Odyssey just boots up as normal.

Here is the link to buy the board: https://shop.rabbitholecomputing.com/products/zuluscsi-blaster

I am not connected to the project at all, just a happy user.

edit: added pic of the board in an Odyssey

[pshoey]

Here is the final product. Installed using a 2.5 to 3.5 hdd adapter installed in the original hdd sledge.

[474lsa]

Exciting news!  Just to confirm, the odyssey does boot up properly with this device?  Previous attempts at using other drives have not been successful because they were incapable of passing security checks at boot.

[pshoey]

Yes, simply copy the complete 4GB SCSI disk image to a file, copy that to the SD card and name it as HD0.img and set the file to read only.

[jay]

I don't have an Odyssey but am curious about the method to copy the hard drive image.

On a PC I typically have to use Rufus or Acronis to copy a hard drive image and in doing so I have booted off of the software so the drive is not active (ie no open swap files etc)... alternatively I would slave this to my PC using a USB adapter.

I certainly applaud this innovation.....

[pshoey]

I wrote my own disk image utility to create a raw sector by sector dump of the drive - all the commercial image tools have their own formats and I didn't want to get locked into having to use one of them.

[pshoey]

Update for how to create an image of SCSI HDD on to SD-Card.

The ZuluSCSI board has a special mode that can read the HDD and create the image on the SD-Card - it is call SCSI Initiator mode.

Connect the ZuluSCSI board via the 50 pin ribbon cable directly to the HDD. Connect power cables to both the Zulu and the HDD.

The SD-Card should be 8GB or larger - and the card should be an SDXC UHS-I or better card. Format it in your PC or Mac - I use exFat format for 64GB cards.

Insert the SD-Card into the slot on the ZuluSCSI and flip the SCSI Initiator dip switch to on and turn on the power.

The led on the Zulu board will flash as it scans the SCSI bus for devices - you should hear the HDD start to spin up.

Once Zulu has found the drive it will start to read the disk content and the led will flash rapidly. The process takes a while - up to 15 mins or so.

Once finished, you will hear the drive stop spinning and the led will stop flashing. You can turn off the power and remove the SD-Card - then reconnect the Zulu board back to the SCSI controller in the Odyssey.

You'll need to put the SD-Card into your PC or Mac computer to finish the process and get the card ready for the Odyssey to boot from it.

There should be a file on the SD-Card named, HD00_imaged.hda which should be 3.99GB (4,294,817,280 bytes) in size.

Rename the file to HD0.img and this is very important, set the file to be read only (or locked if you're using a Mac). This is the equivalent of the write protect jumper on the SCSI drive.

Safely eject the card and put back into the ZuluSCSI.

Now power on your Odyssey and it should boot from the Zulu.

Any questions please post here.

Peter

[cmc206]

Thanks for letting us know! This is fantastic news!

[cramcram]

This is great!  But I thought that the SCSI drive had to support Read- Only mode for normal slot operation?  Does the Zulu SCSI board support this mode?

Thanks,

Marc

[cramcram]

Oh…. I infer that the scsi emulator inherits the file mode (RW or RO).  So does that mean you must take the image of the original, image it with RW permission, select the games to use, save the image, change it to RO, then re-image again and then operate normally.  Is this correct?

Thanks,

Marc

[cmc206]

It just worked for me. I followed the instructions to the tee and its been running like a champ for a couple of weeks now. I also believe it might have even fixed a glitch that was causing the machine to crash. I will need more time to confirm that but so far I havnet had to do a safe clear since I swapped out the SCSI drive.

[cramcram]

Great! I’ll have to try that out in a month or so when I get a chance to pull out the machine again. Now the other two things I worry about on my old Odyssey is the battery backed RAM (I wonder what they store in there?) and the Xilinx FPGA.  Part of the FPGA would be very easy to reverse engineer, but the other part is the encryption algorithm, and that would be a completely different story.

Marc