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>1) Does the power supply have a PS_ON pin that needs to be shorted to tell the power supply to turn on, like a modern atx power power supply? >Answer: On my PC2086 there is no "psu on", "power good", "+5v standby". It has a physical power switch, and it's either on or off. > >2) Will the power...

Welcome to the forum bcg1976. Great year by the way :) (I was born then) No, the Amstrad pc2286 psu will not run without any load. I think I even needed to connect it to the motherboard (and not only to a hard drive for example), but I have to confirm this to be sure.

Indeed, the head 'rattles' or bangs the head a long time during boot. It almost feels like there is something wrong with it after you have used the older version of the drive. And it annoys me at least. But this is intentional, coded to the newer ROM. Why you might ask? Well the older drives...

Great, you'll get it to work after replacing that IC. That would have been my first guess as I mentioned above. It fails easily, if the C64 and/or 1541 are powered on and the serial cable is connected. Static electricity is the killer, so always connect cables when the devices are powered off...

In my experience (in repairing several dozen 1541s) it is often those ICs that I mention that cause 'searching for...' error. Granted, these are probably not the only possible causes for it. Are you familiar with Ray Carlsens work and documentation? Here...

So your drive boots up fine, but gets stuck at 'searching for...' and you're stuck with that situation? A good candidate is to replace UB1 (74LS14) to a new one. This often fails causing this issue. However, it also possible and likely that your UC1 (6522) has failed, it can cause the same...

Let's briefly revisit this 1581 building project. I've had a break from it, probably about 6 months, due to summer works (such as rebuilding the roof of my house and making firewoods for the winter). During my break, I did tested an idea here and there, but it was TOUGH figuring out what was...

Oh boy, these old amstrads are so much fun. I was getting mad about what happened to my memory. I nearly went on thinking I have to replace ths simm sockets. Until finally a solution. Put back jumper to LK 32 ( =enable on board floppy controller). I was going to check how the system would...

I'm glad the Amstrad 2000 series rises discussions. Not so glad about my 2286. Recently, it developed a 'faulty RAM error' duging POST. Alternatively, it can be a 'Parity error'. I have a bunch of old simms, but changes do not seem to help. It's stuck unfortunately. Can someone check the...

Thanks Acgs! The Amstrad does boot from it's original 40Mb hard drive! That part is great! DOS 5.0 is only partially installed though, since I had only one floppy. There is easier way to improve this, I could find dos installation images on-line and create full set of installation disks as long...

Thanks for the thumbs up Caluser2000 :) I was now able to hook up IBM PC compatible 1.4mb floppy drive to the amstrad by making this change to the Amstrad original floppy cable: (Amstrad pin12) DS1 -> pin14 on the floppy end (drive select A) (Amstrad pin10) DS0 -> pin12 on the floppy end...

Thanks Modem7 for that! However, I had some time yesterday evening to fiddle with Amstrad and got some happy news to report! I decided to try out if my earlier 2286 motherboard works with this working unit PSU. I took the motherboard, just the main board, not the extension board that has ISA...

To answer myself: YES! And here it is. Assuming that the 2286 has exact same pinout as the Amstrad 2386. And why wouldn't it be? Comparing to IBM floppy pinout here: https://old.pinouts.ru/HD/InternalDisk_pinout.shtml I do see differences in pins 10,12, 14 and 16. Now I need to figure out...

There is development in my Amstrad 2286 voyage. I now have working PSU and at least partially working motherboard for the Amstrad PC 2286! It only took 169,- euro and win in a new local auction site :). Price includes shipping too. I have had this for a week now, and finally had a chance to test...

You opened the case where you can see the surface of the plates and the heads? That is probaly unfortunate as dust in the room air got in and may/will cause issues later. My drive also gives horrible sound, but still works despite of it.

Welcome to the forum. What a coinsidence, my very first post here was about stuck Seagate 412. You can read my results from this thread: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/seagate-st-412-stuck-spindle-not-spinning.73882/ In my case, it was simply stuck (I guess at the bearings) there...

Gridrunner or Matrix? I had Gridrunner on cassette.

That Amstrad system disk might have been from 2086 or perhaps 1640 model? I remember that my 2286 had MS-DOS 4.01 at the time (1991). I never had sound card with it.

Thanks for all of your comments! I noticed my video in youtube was rather low quality. I will later try to re-edit it with a bit higher resolution. But for now, back to the project. I finally received all the rest of the components. Well, all but the crystal. I grew tired of waiting for that...

Okay, a small perfection to my EPROM reader. There was a line break after every 64 bytes on the hex dump and the last byte was missing. This is not corrected and the dump file size is exactly 65536 bytes in size and because character text file takes two characters to display one byte, the...