12 Aug
2006
12 Aug
'06
10:55 a.m.
On Saturday 12 August 2006 12:14 am, Jeff Davis wrote:
Hi,
I ran across an interesting gadget at a university surplus sale, maybe
someone can tell me how useful it is. It's an EX 2000 Disk Drive Tester.
It came with a couple manuals and some 5.25" alignment floppies. The
manual says it's "used to align and repair floppy disk drives with industry
standard SA400 and SA800 interfaces", and says the connections on the end
are for 5.25" and 8" drives. Here's a photo:
http://www.soupwizard.com/temp/ex2000.jpg
I'm extremely unlikely to be doing any floppy repairs myself, so would this
be useful to anyone else?
I used to do drive alignments way back when, and probably still have an
alignment disk or two stashed away somewhere (though I never did get my hands
on an 8" one :-). With 5.25" drives going away pretty much in the PC
context, the bottom having dropped out of the commodore market some years
back, and the price of 3.5" drives being what they are, I don't know how
worth while it'd be to even bother with it.
Not that I'd toss it if one of those were to come my way...
Somewhere I also have a "drive exerciser" cartridge that plugged into a Yamaha
CX-5 computer as well -- this was no doubt meant for their drive but would
work equally well with any other drive that could be plugged in and powered
up if you adjusted the value of the maximum track number, which was easy
enough to do in the software since it ran in BASIC. It came in handy a few
times.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
