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IBM Model 80 Questions

Unknown_K said:
I hear those cards are cranky in faster MCA machines...
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Exactly, they are merely an ISA design coupled to a microchannel bus. Best is the aftermarket ChipChat, probably the last MCA adapter that was in production. If the RS/6000 card is ever ported I will sitting pretty: I´ve got tons of those adapters.
 
Ok, machine #02 arrived today and it appears to have the same problem.
The heads on either of the two floppy drives are not working correctly.

To be more exact. After discovering that apparently the drive heads were not moving, I removed the logic board from floppy #01 and very gently, manually moved the heads close to the center position. Replaced the board, re-installed the drive and powered it up. The heads did return to default location, so at least I now know they move in one direction. (motor at least is turning) So it seems that they are getting stuck "parked" (for lack of a better word).

My specific knowledge of how floppy drives are supposed to operate is pretty much nil, so any suggestions on how to proceed next would be most welcome. It's pretty obvious that these drives are indeed new and it seems that any repair attempt would be well worth the needed effort.

The good news is that I used my good drive and ran the complete tests from the ref. disk on this machine too and it also passed everything just fine.

Since the precise history of these machines is not exactly clear, maybe this is a common problem that they all had a long time ago.

BTW - My next thought is to pull the board off of the functional drive and try it on one of the new ones. Sound reasonable? Safe to do? Also, I did find a pretty good link for a beginner like me check out. http://www.accurite.com/FloppyPrimer.html. Any others would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Tom
 
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TomFCS said:
...The heads on either of the two floppy drives are not working correctly.

To be more exact. After discovering that apparently the drive heads were not moving, I removed the logic board from floppy #01 and very gently, manually moved the heads close to the center position. Replaced the board, re-installed the drive and powered it up. The heads did return to default location, so at least I now know they move in one direction. (motor at least is turning) So it seems that they are getting stuck "parked" (for lack of a better word).

My specific knowledge of how floppy drives are supposed to operate is pretty much nil, so any suggestions on how to proceed next would be most welcome. It's pretty obvious that these drives are indeed new and it seems that any repair attempt would be well worth the needed effort.

The good news is that I used my good drive and ran the complete tests from the ref. disk on this machine too and it also passed everything just fine.

Since the precise history of these machines is not exactly clear, maybe this is a common problem that they all had a long time ago.

BTW - My next thought is to pull the board off of the functional drive and try it on one of the new ones. Sound reasonable? Safe to do?
Click to expand...

Brand of the drives? There were patches, like replacing certain capacitors on the logic board. As long as they are the same types, gently switching components could in fact work, granted that the errors are in different areas of the drives.
 
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Druid6900 said:
You will note that "successfully repaired" is crossed out....
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It´s been ages since I have heard from Al. I have a couple Model 90s from him, including the unit he served those pages from before. Maybe even one of the Model 80s I have around might have been from him too.
 
Druid6900 said:
You will note that "successfully repaired" is crossed out....
Click to expand...

Yea, was wondering about that myself. When one of my model 80 floppies died I looked all over the net and found that reference. I ended up just putting a working drive in there and keeping the old one incase I could fix it.
 
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