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So I'm back to getting at least one DCS-200 working reliably and have the same problems I did before. I'm thinking both internal hard drives I own have gone bad, as one pulls up 399 pictures, the other 149 when I think the drive only held 25, and half the time it won't fire, the other times it fires over and over and the drive seems to engage and then shut down. So I have the following questions/wants:

Anyone got a spare battery holder for the digital back?

The drives are some 2.5 inch SCSI I can find very little documentation on; but are the same as some early Apple drives. One guy in Japan was selling flash converters a while ago on Ebay that let a compact flash card would work with the SCSI input; anyone ever try one of these?

The manual says external hard drives can be hooked up; do I need a terminator on the internal cable if I remove the balky internal drive? Also, the external port is a DB-25 (Narrow) SCSI cable, would any writable drive work, and does it (I assume) need to be formatted in FAT-16?

The camera says "E" on the film meter; several people have reported the N8008 body refusing to fire, which is what I'm getting half the time. This body is one that came from a DCS-200, it has the correct focusing screen with the mapped out area. I saw it needs to be on 50 or 100 ISO, single frame advance, and and preferred not in one of the program modes. Does anything else need to be set or is it more likely the balky hard drives aren't sending a "OK to fire" signal back to the camera body?

Appreciate any help, this is a very arcane beast.

Scott

"E"

I'm just guessing madly, but I know the later DCS-400s had to have a little pin stuck just above the film transport rails in order to get the frame counter to work properly - assuming the DCS-200 was the same, perhaps it has fallen out, and the camera thinks it has no more "film" and refuses to fire. But I could be very wrong.

Thanks, I saw the advice about taking the pin out on another forum and tried it, but no luck. It looks like it is correct the pin should be out as both my NC-2000e and DCS-420 are missing theirs.

The hard drives have definitely gone bad as they won't even register now, but also I'm not sure if the NIMH batteries I was trying were good, and low/erratic power would explain some of the things the body was doing.

I'll try again later on with a set of lithium batteries, the hard drives have fallen into the rare/high price category, although no one seems to buy them. The guy from Japan who was selling the flash converter cards also seems to have folded up his tent. (They were expensive at over $100 each).

At some point I'll have a go with an external SCSI device, anything with a FAT-16 partition should work; the question is the internal drive and whether it needs a terminator, but if I scour Ebay enough I'm pretty sure an Apple terminator can be found.