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ibm p70 plasma screen and disk drive

L

linemanduke

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Mar 22, 2006
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marietta georgia
I'm the proud new owner of an IBM p70 the plasma screen is having a problem there's a real bright line about ____this long near the top left corner it leaves a line across and darkens all below it what could cause this? also t6he diskette drive wont work it moves spins but refuses to read gives a general error in ms dos other than this and the broken door in the back I'm in love with it but would like to get this fixed
 
The P70 is infamous for the diskette drive not working. The way they designed it puts a lot of stress on the internal workings. Out of the 3 P70s I have, one has a totally dead plasma screen, the other has your diskette drive problem, and the 3rd one I had to buy a rebuild ESDI hard drive because the original drive was dead.

This site http://incolor.inebraska.com/jshorney/p70.htm

has tons of good info on the P70.

In my case, I'm just going to take the diskette drive off the one with the broken plasma screen and put it on the one with the diskette drive that doesn't work.
 
also if it means any thin the man i got it for said the drive worked the last time he used it to do his 1996 taxes and also when he'd use it he'd try and use a monitor and tilt it down on its side (he worked for ibm and new of the problems that could develop). also it tells me after i hit retry that the drive parameter is no longer valid what does that even mean?
 
You can try one of those "3.5 diskette cleaning" deals, if you want. I use the wet kind, where you put some drops out of the provided bottle on the cleaning diskette.

You put it in there after applying the drops and access the a: drive to get it to spin. I usually do it twice for newly arrived items. You can also just do retry a whole bunch of times. With my Kaypros, I just kept accessing the disk, for literally about 30 minutes. It finally starting working right. It still works right most of the time, I sometimes have to "warm it up" again by doing a bunch of retries.
 
im out of fluid lol i went to the best buy and they just looked at me weird lol will alcohol and a q tip work? or will it leave a film on it?
 
Actually, I strongly believe that the alcohol you have will work. Just use 5 or 6 drops of that instead. Very hard to get in there with a Q-tip, tends to leave "fuzz" all over the place when you pull it out.

Run the cleaning diskette about 30 seconds each time. I do the infamous "one one-thousand two one-thousand etc." deal while it is in there going swish/swish/swish.

If the drive stops running, just do another "dir a:" to get it going again.
 
Unfortunately, that one sounds like some sort of physical damage to the screen itself or the supporting electronics.
 
Q-Tips contain starch, which can possibly leave a film behind. Better to get the swabs from RadioShark, preferably the foam-tipped ones, cotton as last resort. Try to find alcohol that's at least 70%. That watered-down 50% they sell these days ain't worth a crap. If you shop around you should be able to find ~90% or better.

--T
 
results using cleaning disk and denatured alcohol
..........nada
results of repedadly accesing drive.....for an hour .
......nada and a really tired finger

but now when it starts it makes a familiar noise gner gner wah and its the head scans the disk up and down three times when i type a:\ before it would just scan up and back down and stop
 
Ok, must be "research finding a replacement floppy drive" time. Through Google, I have found instructions with pictures even on how to take a P70 apart. No, I didn't bookmark it. But it had nice instructions on pulling the cover, taking out the drive, all that stuff. I too, get to either find it again or wing it while I exchange floppy drives.
 
The hard drive on those tend to "get stuck". You turn them off and I guess the head actually sticks to drive surface while it's off. Anyway, if you are lucky, sometimes it "unsticks" as the drive tries to start spinning, and voila! You have a hard drive again. I didn't have that kind of luck with my first P70. Poor thing never did spin again. I had to buy a "refurb" drive.
 
my hard drives fine 120 meg 20 meg free ive got the covers off ive removed cleaned and reassymbled it all if itsw network card was rj45 instead of bnc id have no need for the drive. lol
 
what are the reference disk for? there's 10 that came with it all of them different. i guess there a boot disk is this right?
the guy i got it from has it so it boots to ms-dos 3.3 and you type c:\w311\win and it loads windows
 
All the Micro Channel Arch. stuff is all configured in IBM PS/2 land with the now infamous "reference disk". You find a cheap MCA RJ45 NIC card, going to need to run the reference disk to let the PS/2 know what the card is. Same as "Setup" in Compaq land. Each card has a "adf" (I think it is) file that tells the system all about it. Like a "inf" in Windoze.
 
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