Apple ][ (clone) disk booting

Hi, Unfortunately, this is normal behaviour for a lot of disk system faults. I've just worked my way through a huge pile of Apple II disk drives and controllers. Many of the drives and some of the controllers showed the fault described here - head stepped all the way out looking for data on track zero, finding nothing. #1 cause here was dirty heads, followed by bad alignment, then various analog board faults. Slight alignment issues or slightly dirty heads would cause a violent-sounding reseek.

I will have to spend some time eventually going through the faulty drives and figure out what's wrong. I have an oscilloscope (10Mhz only, but I have a feeling that'll do!),

and the analog boards don't look overly complicated. Does anyone know of a reference that details signals at test points etc? Knowing what I'm looking for would be nice. Does anyone have an image or similar for a test disk that can be written with a known-good drive? As mentioned in a recent post, any disk without copy protection would do if not.

I developed a very rough but surprisingly functional test for bad alignment; putting a little pressure on the head carrier (or spiral disk) to move it a tiny amount in each direction was often enough to bring track zero close enough to alignment that the drive would spring into life. If that worked, at least I knew that the drive was basically functional, and probably just needed an align. I also need to track down info on how to align those spiral-disk-head-drive type mechanisms (Shugart? or were they ALPS? I forget). I used to know this stuff once, but that was a long time ago, and it's just not coming back on its own. Mike.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jules Richardson" <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> To: <General at 5star.net.nz>; "Discussion at 5star.net.nz:On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2007 11:59 PM Subject: Apple ][ (clone) disk booting > Morning, > > What's the normal procedure to boot a floppy from an Apple ][? I'm just > taking a look at my Mitac [1] clone (with a view to selling it) and got > curious as to whether it'd boot a standard Apple DOS system disk. > > If powered up with a drive connected the spindle motor starts and it'll > step the drive head back to track 0 - but nothing more. > > On the one hand, it's entirely possible that the machine isn't a close > enough clone to work with standard Apple DOS (that wouldn't surprise me > at all, in fact) - but on the other, maybe I'm just missing some standard > key combination to magically boot from the drive... (whilst I've got an > Apple ///, I've never used an Apple ][ in my life) > > I can hit CTRL-reset and the machine will drop to BASIC; is there a > normal way of booting (or at least bringing up a dir) a floppy from BASIC > on a genuine ][? > > [1] Quite an impressive machine. Has some flavour of far-east legends on > the key fronts, as well as regular ASCII (we had a discussion about it on > here once, but there were conflicting opinions on what language it > actually was). Built-in disk controller, joystick port, tape, TV > modulator, 80-column card. There's a little backplane which can be > plugged into the machine's expansion port and gives you five Apple ][ > card slots, too. > > cheers > > Jules