8 Oct
2012
8 Oct
'12
3:23 a.m.
On 10/07/2012 08:50 PM, David Greelish wrote:
Can anyone help my friend Kyle out? Please email him
directly - kylevowen at gmail.com
My experience with these is before you put a disk in the drive it is
necessary to insure everything is
right and the controller works. Reason, In the past I've supplied disks
and the controller/disk was
configured wrong for the target system and would get wiped on boot or
never boot due to system errors.
The second thing is most of the NS controllers with socketed parts have
developed bad sockets
making them intermittent at best. The problem is often compounded when
someone tried to shotgun
trouble shoot by replacing ICs often with bad ones so then there are two
problems to solve.
In general there is not enough rom in a NS to troubleshot them
conveniently. I have long since
resorted to a CPU card with ROM/RAM/IO to sidestep the whole horizon Io
and disk till there is
enough working.
Allison
I'm trying to revive a N* Horizon, and as
I've found out, you have to have a booting machine to make boot disks. In order to
have a booting machine, you either need a boot disk or a ROM board. My processor board
doesn't have a ROM option, so I'm out of luck. I have supposedly 4 boot disks, but
none of these seem to get the computer booting, though I hear the drive head move back and
forth as it seems to read the disk. I still don't get any output into the right serial
port.
Does anyone have access to a bootable Horizon? I have a few hard sector floppies, so if I
could get a boot disk copied, that'd be great. Optimally, I'd like to try to read
these disks on a known working machine before having to overwrite any. Two aren't
labeled, so they may very well be blank. All of the others have labels indicating some
possibly neat programs, like Microstat, WordStar, and Mailing List Utility. About half of
the disks are labeled Care. Care System, Care Data, Care Source Code, and so on. Any idea
what the Care System could be? Another one is from Validata Computer and Research
Corporation, which apparently is still alive an well in Montgomery, AL. It's entitled
"5 Meg Hard Disk Start Up Diskette for Worcs, PM, Care Systems". No telling,
eh?
My system has a CompuPro 24k SRAM card (with only 20k populated), a N* RAM16-A3 16k RAM
card (fully populated), a N* ZPB-A2 processor card (no ROM option) and a N* MDS-AD3 double
density floppy controller, all on a N* HRZ-MB-3 motherboard. From the double density FC, I
would indeed need a DD boot disk. Judging from the date codes, I would date this
particular machine to 1979.
Thanks,
Kyle