This is on a MicroStar machine that runs StarDos. I
know nothing about this
but from recent posts I decided to drag one of them down and look into it a
little further. This machine I have running is a Micro Five 1000 with a IMI
10 meg HD. It has a boot menu and back up Menu. It will still boot and
will make its own formatted floppies and back itself up with out much
problems. If I try to read one of the floppies with Image disk or Anadisk
they fail. It tried with both 360 and 1.2 meg drives. I would guess that
How do they fail? Can you read anything from any cylinder?
Do you have any reason to assume that the Micro Fice controller is a
normal MFM one? Some PCs can also read FM (single density) formats. But
if the Micro Five is GCR or something odd, no normal PC is going to be
able to read it.
If you can read something from cylinder 0, but it fails on other
cylinders, it might be a 100tpi drive (I thinkl cylinder 0 is in the
same place on both 100tpi and 96 tpi drives).
the drive in the machine is off enough to cause these
problems . If I
install another floppy drive, the System picks up something and errors. So
there must be some other signal or ??? coming from the drive. The
machine date is in the 84 -85 range
Doe the machine do anything with the replacement drive? Does it spin up,
do the heads seek?
The straps on the drive (M 4 x 3 2 1 H) are set with M and 1 jumpered
I am ownderign what hte 'M' jumper is. Is it 'multiplexed' -- that is,
'Enable the otuput drives all the time, so the controller can read the
drive status always'? I know some machines used that. It limits you to
one drive per cable, but it maeans you can reliabled use the write
protect signals as a start for a disk changed line, for example.
I don't suppose anyone has a sourve for service manuals for CDC/MPI
full-height 5.25" drives? I have an HP9826 going o nthe bench soon, the
drive in that is a CDC/MPI (HP badged, but the original labels are there
too). I really could do with a maechanical dismantiling/ reassembling/
alignment manual. There's an odd damper-like thing on the head carriage,
for example, which seems to be leaking grease.
-tony