General Stuff(tm)

[JezC]

@stephen_usher you have my sympathies. I’ve been working on an Opus Challenger 3 in 1, got the ram working now but the drive spins up but doesn’t step whilst trying to format or read.

That's worrying @PhilC as I have one of those as well... recapping the two Beeb model Bs and ancillaries is way down the hobby priority list at the moment though :( :roll:

[PhilC]

@stephen_usher you have my sympathies. I’ve been working on an Opus Challenger 3 in 1, got the ram working now but the drive spins up but doesn’t step whilst trying to format or read.

That's worrying @PhilC as I have one of those as well... recapping the two Beeb model Bs and ancillaries is way down the hobby priority list at the moment though :( :roll:

Don’t worry too much Jez, it’s probably a cabling issue or a problem with the Beeb as it’s used on the 1mhz bus and this Beebs never used that before. I think the drive is fine as I’ve substituted it for another. Some of the ram was faulty though and only intermittently detecting the second 256K bank.

[rubber_jonnie]

More shenanigans with the Kaypro drives this morning.

Drive B's motor decided to run full speed whatever I did, even replacing the LM2917 on the servo control board.

I'd already reflowed the solder on the connector, which had cracks. So it was a case of buzzing out traces.

Found that an old bodge to repair where a capacitor had been pushed through the board and pulled the trace off the board wasn't working any more. It was extremely ugly anyway. So I removed it, put a proper bodge wire across the board, secured by hot snot, and resoldered the leg of the capacitor to a better piece of the trace.

That worked.

Put everything back together yet again... and Drive A started playing up. *sigh*

It's almost like they want to die!!!

You have my sympathies also as I have a Cumana drive for BBC that is just not spinning, and what makes it worse is that it's in a dual drive case. Must look at it sometime, but I also need to get a 5 1/4" dive to go with my Greaseweasel so I can make a Cumana boot disk.

Oh wait, I can use the working 2nd drive from the dual Cumana :)

[stephen_usher]

Ah... non spinning drives... did you try giving the motor a it of a push? Works for my Drive B. :-)

[rubber_jonnie]

Ah... non spinning drives... did you try giving the motor a it of a push? Works for my Drive B. :-)

Not yet, but I'll try it at some point in the near future.

[stephen_usher]

Re-aligned Drive A again, using a disk written on Drive B. That now boots.

Seeing as I need the bench for the Apricot Xi arriving tomorrow I've deemed this a "good enough" fix. I don't think those Tandon drives will ever be fully reliable, if they ever were. The only thing left to do on that machine is to swap out the Z80 SIO/1 with the Z80 SIO/0 when it arrives, which will allow the computer to beep the speaker in the keyboard, as that's all the the transmit side of channel B does.

I've written all the fixes I've done on a PostIt note and put it in the machine so that whoever gets the machine next knows the state of play.

[PhilC]

Ah so you’re venturing into Norfolk for the old Apricot.

And great that you’ve done a history for the machine you’ve repaired. I like to do that too sometimes. At least little hints here and there.

[stephen_usher]

Ah so you’re venturing into Norfolk for the old Apricot.

And great that you’ve done a history for the machine you’ve repaired. I like to do that too sometimes. At least little hints here and there.

Yeah, apparently 7 hour drive round trip.

[rubber_jonnie]

Ah so you’re venturing into Norfolk for the old Apricot.

And great that you’ve done a history for the machine you’ve repaired. I like to do that too sometimes. At least little hints here and there.

Yeah, apparently 7 hour drive round trip.

Bit of a hike, no wonder your weekends are busy!

[stephen_usher]

Yeah, and next weekend I'm helping with the model railway club's big annual show, which is taking the whole of a community college, all weekend.