Hitachi HL320 TypeRA60A

 

Hitachi HL320 TypeRA60A mfg no. 00321

This is a 8088 4.8MHz machine with 512 KB RAM, 20MB hard disk, 720KB floppy disk, LCD mono display, connectors for serial port, parallel port and external floppy drive. Unusually for a laptop it has a detachable keyboard. Cheaper versions of this machine were equipped with two 720K floppy drives. Working, but the Fuji Electric FK309X-26 hard disk needs attention as it sometimes fails to be recognised.
I was seeking a replacement but have discovered that the drive is non standard. From the pictures below you see that no details of cylinders, heads etc have been marked on the label.

A google search has revealed that unless the X is significant, the drive parameters are detailed on this page: http://cdh.bsd.st/drives/other/drivelist.html which indicates that it is an ST-506 MFM 3.5 inch drive with a 40 pin connector which is not to the ST-506 standard which normally has two edge connectors one 34 way and one 20 way, on some of the 3.5" drives these edge connectors where replaced with pins but normally two separate sets. This drive has one set of pins a bit like an IDE drive so it uses a propriety interface basically ST-506 but with a different pin out so this could be what the X stands for in the model number. Some manufacturers used to do this so you couldn't use anyone else's drive in your system, IBM also did this on some of there PS1's using an edge connector on an IDE drive for example.

I was able to boot from a floppy disk and copy files from the hard disk. However I had to hunt out a bunch of floppies and reformat them to 720k. I then made a new boot disk (MSDOS ver 6.2) including Format and Scandisk. Running the latter revealed that there were 4 bad areas which needed fixing. I ran Scandisk twice then Format c:/s. Rebooted twice and seemed fine. I then loaded and run a program and all seemed OK until I decided to install the rest of MSDOS. checking again with Scandisk ther was another cluster error. So now was the time to low level format to see if it would be beneficial and I saw that "llformat.exe and llformat.com" can be downloaded from the internet. Sadly neither worked and the machine now has gone back to its completely uncooperative self (it ticks away like a sewing machine)! It is now shelved until someone has a better idea. Japan 1988

 

Inside view The hard is disk on the left and the floppy disk on right. The memory chips are below the keyboard cable with plug. Note the date code (8809) on the battery.