Timex FDD 3000

Resources

Please check out Timex Computer 2048 and Timex FDD (3-piece) pages as well.

Don’t put the monitor on top of Timex FDD 3000, like in the pictures above. CRT generates electromagnetic field that interferes with this drive and generates significantly more read errors.

Documents

Internals

Motherboard

Capacitors List

Power Transformer

This transformer was giving 20V AC at the output.

Floppy Disk Drive

This is single-side Hitachi HFD305SXA.

Drive Board

Head

Rotation Motor

Frame

It should be also possible to connect the double-side version of the drive, Hitachi HFD305D. I got it as a replacement for one of the drives that was broken, but I have not yet tried to install it.

In order to create physical 3″ floppies, connect the drive to a vintage PC. The correct drive selection jumper has to be selected on the drive. The jumper position closest to the center of the drive board is drive 0. The others are drive 1, 2 and 3. If the drive is in a chain before another drive, remember to remove the terminator from the 3″ drive – the light-blue chip closest to the edge connector. The BIOS settings that worked for me was to choose 5.25″ 360KB drive. I suppose the other settings will work too, as the raw drive write program will ignore the BIOS settings.

Disk images can be downloaded from this page. They can be written using CPDWrite program that is available on this page.

The boot procedure that worked for me was the following:

Power on FDD with floppy inserted – it should do some drive activity as it reads data from it
Power on Timex – it should reset the FDD, which should read only the first sector. Timex should print TIMEX – TOS V A.2 (or other text in case of other TOS version)

At this stage it is possible to enter floppy commands, for example CAT * to display the directory.

Timex Interface

This interface looks like a home-made version. It has EINTMX v1 markings on the PCB. It is also missing the reset button. I saved the ROM content and it is available in the documents section. If you know anything about this interface please let me know.