Re: Floppy fixed! Boots, but disk problem ...

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Stephen M. Jones wrote:

> That was it, I cleaned the sensor with a soft paper towel and found an
> oily residue on it.. I put it back in the machine and .. its works! Thanks!

Cool. :)  

> I was under the impression the images I got were LisaOS 3.1 .. however,
> they state they are LisaOS 3.0 1983, 1984 .. but that shouldn't make a
> difference, right?

The only difference between 3.1 and 3.0 is that 3.1 added another tool - LisaTerminal I think. :)  

> I don't think the drive is dead, its actually spins nicely and doesn't
> make any strange scraping or funky calibration sounds.

One thing I wasn't clear about... is this hard drive an internal (Widget) or an external (ProFile)?

If it's a profile, on power up, it should also flicker the red LED.. not sure about Widget drives... At this point what's happening is that the drive has it's own Z8 cpu (microcontroller actually) that can scan the drive for errors, and it is doing just that. I think it took something like 5 minutes for this process before the Lisa would see the disk...  

> I would like to do my best to 'repair' the internal drive .. I'm damn
> curious to see whats on it ;-)

More than likely the media lost the data it was holding. I've seen this happen to my profile hd's.... I installed an OS on them a very long time ago, and a few years later when I powered them back on, they had lost all data, but if I reinstalled an OS, they'd hold the OS for a long while...

If you don't mind wiping it, you could try to boot up MacWorks and see if it can format it... Or Xenix. :)

If it's external, are you attaching it directly to the parallel port, or to a dual parallel port card? If it's on a card, I seem to recall only being able to use one of the ports to off boot off from, but that the parallel port on the motherboard always worked. (could be my parallel card wasn't working?)

The profile cable is just a straight through DB25 cable with all the pins wired. Be careful - if you buy a replacement.

Some DB25-DB25 cables are made for serial cables, and to save money the manufacturers don't wire all the pins...

You should get a small ohm/volt meter - set it to OHM's and try the pins on each end. All of the pins should be wired - except for one which I think is missing on the original ribbon cable...

The Lisa detects the ProFile/Widget drive by a single pin (Open Cable Detect), so even though the Lisa POST can see the drive, it might not be able to talk to it. So check the cable.

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