9 Mar
2023
9 Mar
'23
8:03 p.m.
On Thu, Mar 9, 2023 at 2:22 PM John Maxwell via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
no caps like that, this is an IBM.
Even if there is stiction you should still try to boot and capture as much
info as you can first before you replace the battery.
On 9-Mar-23 10h36. Grant Taylor wrote:
That's my point, at least try the system see if it works as is, but assume
the battery is just about dead if not completely. May have enough juice
for one or two more boots. so get the info out of it you can. The chances
a model 80 will smoke out or catch fire is less enough to make that a
secondary concern.
On 3/9/23 6:20 AM, Bill Degnan wrote:
> First and foremost, try to boot the computer to make note of the
> configuration, if there is one still stored in the system.
Nowhere do I see any mention of a Model 80 Reference Disk. If you don't
have one of these, you will not be able to configure the machine. I
_should_ have a copy of one lying around (or already imaged/archived) - the
main problem is finding the ADF (Adaptor Description Files) for the added
features/cards. My copy of the Reference Disk would not likely have any
ADFs from obscure cards, but should have the common files. Let me know if
you need a copy. I recall that I had a 'master diskette' with many
collected ADFs which came through the lab. Would have to look for that one,
if interested. ADFs were text files with descriptions of hardware addresses
and the like.
Hum. That sort of surprises me. I naively
assumed that there would be
some work that I should do before powering the system on to make sure that
there >weren't any spicy components that would make me regret my choices.
Did IBM not use Rifas? Is there any other hardware concerns?
Not sure of what you mean by 'Rifas' in the last question. Probably an
acronym or other abbreviation of something I may know about, but nothing
comes to my foggy brain presently.
I am somewhat
worried about stiction on the old hard drives.
"Stiction" is probably not your biggest concern regarding the hard drives.
The real problem could be stuck bearings - depending upon HDD model
installed. "Stiction" is the condition where the spindle motor did not have
enough torque to free the head from the platter surfaces - the drives used
in all of the PS/2 Model 80 machines that we saw were beefy enough to
overcome any "stiction" condition. We, in the repair lab (years ago, of
course), used to see this on the original Apple Mac SE and SE/30 machines
where a Sony 20Mb drive was used (the model number has long since been
forgotten and is irrelevant to our discussion, of course) but we used to
give them assistance to last a couple of startups (or at least one!) for
backing up data by using our "inertial rotation" technique to physically
spin the drive using hand motion. We would (wrist-strap grounded, of
course) grab with our free arm the drive in axial alignment over the
spindle and rotate the drive a few times around back and forth in a
snapping action. 95% of the time it would work to retrieve the data before
we would RMA the drive back to Apple.
I used to work at IBM when they sold these.
Bill
But I tend to not work on systems this old that
have been sitting for a
long time often enough to know what I should check.
<snip>