User guide

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Introduction
This document provides an overview on the H8/H89 “Z67-IDE” controller board design by
Norberto Collado for the Heathkit H8/H89 Computer.
Z67-IDE DISK CONTROLLER
The H8/H89 “Z67-IDE” DISK CONTROLLER supports the functionality of the QUIKSTOR
Winchester sub-system from Quikdata Computer Services, Inc. Quikdata Computer Services,
Inc. provided a compact 5" Winchester solution called the QUIKSTOR which included a drive,
cabinet, power supply, fan, cables and the Xebec S1410 disk controller. Also Quikdata
Computer Services provided high quality software drivers for CP/M and HDOS. The interface to
the host system for the H8 was via the WH8-37, and for the H89 was via the Z-89-67 disk
controller. This was the only board available to support any hard drive on the H8/H89. The
WH-8-37 card contains both a 5" soft sector H37 compatible floppy controller interface, and a
standard SASI interface bus. Since this card has both interfaces build in, and CP/M only supports
two devices, the majority of the users will only have this card installed.
The H8/H89 “Z67-IDE” DISK CONTROLLER presents itself to the QSBIOS (by Livingston Logic), as
a XEBEC S-1410 Winchester disk controller, allowing use of any available IDE hard drives, CF
cards (embedded IDE-CF adapter by Addonics), and SATA hard drives (IDE to SATA drive
Motherboard adapter by StarTech.com). It supports “15” partitions of any size from 16
Kilobytes to 8 Megabytes, and any four partitions may be mounted at any time. QSBIOS
supports booting from any of the “15” partitions, but only the first partition from Hard Drive 0
or 1 has been tested without any issues. Quikdata Computer Services detailed documentation is
included at the end of this document for users who want to explore this capability.
The H8/H89 “Z67-IDE” DISK CONTROLLER with QSBIOS is operable at any CPU speed up to 4
MHz, and it supports two bootable IDE hard drives via the H8 front panel or via the H89 Boot
BIOS. The H8/H89 “Z67-IDE” only supports one Host Controller, so connecting two of these
controllers to expand beyond 2 hard drives is not supported by the Z-89-67 and WH-8-37 card.
According to Quikdata documentation, this configuration was never tested on the
WH-8-37/Z-89-67 controller and was only tested on the H89 Magnolia Microsystems 77320
SASI/SERIAL card.
The H8/H89 “Z67-IDE” SASI DISK CONTROLLER can be mounted inside the H8 computer cabinet
when using CF cards or externally inside an ATX enclosure when using IDE or SATA hard drives.
Also included are holes to mount the HSFE (Hard Sector Floppy Emulator by C. Elmquist) design
to support external 1.44MB 3.5" floppies drives attached to the H17 or to the WH8-37 card.