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Picked up a Lisa for testing and evaluation and questions to follow

Ok I have another question to ask! I noticed there are 2 26 pin connectors behind the floppy drive mounting cage. If I hook up the longer cable which I guess is for the twiggy drives to the Lite adapter will it hurt it at all?
 
It's a Lisa 2/5 it had an internal hard drive I think. Ok NeXT see picture. There is also a power cable of some type.
 

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What in the name of.... Okay, I know that one of the cables feeds to the backplane connector and the power connector is nothing special, but I've never even heard of the second connector, let alone where it comes from.
 
Two cables is normal but often times the second cable is hidden if you have an external Profile drive. Normally one is connected to the floppy drive and the second to a hard drive (normally a Widget drive). I have never even considered connecting two floppies. I'm not sure you can because otherwise you would need two Lisa Lite cards? Not sure on this (never tried). Here's mine with floppy and a SunRem 20MB MFM drive. It's also used with my X/Profile.

Lisa SunRem 20MB MFM - back.jpgLisa SunRem 20mb MFM - front.jpg
 
You have a Lisa 2/10 / Mac XL case though. The presence of the Twiggy power connector means he has an upgraded Lisa 1 / 2/5 like I do. We don't have the second ribbon cable and to get said cable would require replacement of the wire harness.

Unless I'm so tired right now I'm totally mistaken.
 
It's a Lisa 2/5 it had an internal hard drive I think. Ok NeXT see picture. There is also a power cable of some type.

I could be mistaken but isn't that a cable and power connector for a Widget hard drive that should be occupying that space? Is the unit a Lisa 2/10 (Mac XL) which has had the Widget hard drive removed?

Tez
 
The X/Profile card works nicely with those connectors. My main Lisa (a Lisa 2/10 ) has one these fitted in place of its non working widget.
 
Ok back to the no eject problem. Lisa experts please help or anyone with more knowledge about this thing than I do.

OK where does that eject signal originate from? It doesn't seem to go through the 5 chips on the Lite adapter but straight through from the 26 pin cable. Also which pin is the eject pin?
 
Alright got 3 Apple Profile drives for testing. Already check the power supplies they look good. Now when turned on the front panel red light flashes and I hear a ticking sound. Not good right 2 of them are doing it. The other is a solid red light. Please help!!!

Fixing Lisa keyboards right now. Foam pads are disintegrated!
 
Flashing red light and ticking is GOOD! This is the drive coming up to speed and doing it's start up check. If you open the drive up, you'll see the drive head passing over the disk platter in steps. The clicking is the stepper motor. At the end of the check, the "Ready" light will go solid red. This is normal for 5MB Profiles. I can't get to my 10MB Profile right now so check the back of the "solid red light" drive to see if it's the same model number as the other two. It might end in "10" instead of "05" meaning it's a 10MB drive.

If you wait a little, I am uploading a YouTube video of the start up of one of my 5MB drives. You can see it here when it's finished.


You can judge how long it takes to start up. Be patient. It takes a least a minute to start up, get to speed, test the disk and give the "all clear" :)
 
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Yep you were right @snuci. After about a minute it went solid red! Ok so I have 2 5 MB and 1 10 MB ProFile drives. The 10 came up to solid red pretty quickly.

Just got through putting in foam pads for 2 of the Lisa keyboards out of 3 we found.

My friend who is the actual owner of this Lisa is very pleased with what I found scrounging around. 3 More Lisa's! So that is why I have 3 ProFile drives and keyboards.

But 2 of the Lisa's are in not so good shape the batteries leaked onto the motherboard and the I/O card. Motherboard and RAM cards look ok though. But my friend thinks he can clean it up and maybe make one workable. The other Lisa almost looks like it just came out of the box. Still nice platinum color.

Also found a Sun SCSI card! that's mine.
 
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Error 83 - Other Drive Problem
Error 85 - Drive can't keep up

Take it apart and clean the drive, reseat any chips on it and if the drive motor is accessible, try to spin it and see if there are any stiction issues (disk platters do not not spin freely).
 
While the HDA inside the Profile was a very reliable Seagate ST506 or ST412, the Apple designed electronics were generally not much more reliable than the later Widgets. Try running the drives upside down for a day so the old grease in the bearings can be worked around.
 
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