24 Apr
2004
24 Apr
'04
10:34 a.m.
On Sat, 2004-04-24 at 21:34, Tony Duell wrote:
Phew - it's just good to know someone has them. I doubt there are many
of these machines about any more.
Well I'll see how things go; hopefully it won't come to that!
ta - I've given the power distribution board a wash and got the worst of
it off. I didn't bring the system board home with me so that one will
have to wait a few days (and the other machine!)
It's better than water :-]
Problem on those rodime drives is that everything comes apart from the
top IIRC, so there's no way of getting at the spindle bearing without
taking the lid off and all the platters out :( Squirting some WD40 in
through the little gap between the motor shell and the drive chassis
managed to get enough onto the bearing assembly to disperse all the
crud.
I imagine it'll do nasty things longer term when everything's at running
temperature, but if the drive just runs long enough to copy anything
that looks useful off it, then that's better than a drive that was
locked solid.
Does anyone
have OS install media for these? We've got the manuals, but
Yes, but on 3.5" (720K) disks. You can put a 3.5" drive in place of the
standard 5.25" 80 cylinder one, at least temporarily, to do an OS install. Don't
suppose anybody has schematics / service information?
Yes I do, inclduing schematics of the bits that weren't in the oficial
manuals... Predictably,
the batteries inside the machines are toast and have taken
half the circuitry with them (grr!). I'll clean everything up and then
Well known problem. The 0.1" header connector between the power
distribution board and the mainboard often suffers, BTW. Clean things up
with a dilute solution of citric acid, the battery electrolyte is alkaline. I think you need the batteries to act as a shunt
regulator for the RTC
chip. You certainly do on a Torch XXX.
Hmm, it does feed around 3V to the system board when the power's off,
presumably for the RTC. It'll get voltage from the PSU (switched via a
transistor on the board I have here, although it looks like they
originally just fed +5V in via a diode) when everything's running, so in
theory it doesn't need the batteries for anything once running from
mains power.
I've got
one hard drive to spin up and become ready after dumping half a
can of WD40 onto the bottom spindle bearing - it wouldn't even turn
WD40 is not really a lubricant! Hmmm.. I prefer healthy cats...
Me too!
If you have the IBM slot adapter (which adds 3 8-bit
ISA slots), then
presumanly you could put a tape controller in one of those slots and
write software to talk to it. I've never heard of it being done, and the
IBM slot adapters are not exactly common.
Nope, no adapters in either of these machines. One has a 2MB memory
board, the other hasn't been expanded at all. At least they have
Ethernet, so I can hook it up to the LAN and copy anything useful off
that way.
cheers
Jules