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First power on with the Osborne 1, have issues.

You don't need to destroy the Osborne 1's originality - A Gotek just makes it easier to get it booting and troubleshoot and write disks you know it can read. As long as you don't damage the internals, Use of the adapter just allows you to plug a Gotek in, boot and fix it then you can switch straight back to the original drives :)
 
I did not think about that and will definitely think seriously about getting one.
 
Well my Windows 98 pc that I used to make disks before I purchased the greaseweazle did not power on, bad power supply.

So dug out a good spare 420 watt power supply and now it boots.

The plan was to retire this pc as a disk making machine and turn in back into a dedicated Win 98 gaming pc since it has the best Win 98 era motherboard and cpu combo that I have.

Looks like that retirement is on hold a for a while.

Now I will try to make a disk that boots.



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None of the floppy I made with imagedisk in DOS worked.

Also dug out another floppy cable to try and nothing changed.

Hopefully the Osborne 1A thats due in a couple of days as at least a working drive plus other parts to swap out and test.

Otherwise I have to wait for my hobby money to build up since I exceeded the budget this month and next months budget for my toys.
 
Klee said:
So I turned it off then plugged the keyboard in and the screen went all jumpy
Click to expand...
This happened to my Osborne 1 too when i first got it. Probably there are a few keys stuck. For me, it were a few number keys (7 and 8 I believe). They get pushed in when you attach the keyboard to the computer for storage but don't unplug the cable. There are ways to get them unstuck, sometimes just pushing them a bit or apply some heat from a heatgun can free them up.

Once you have a good bootdisk, boot it using a jumper wire and then plug the keyboard in. If it starts to "type" a character, that one is stuck.
 
Keyboard definitely has stuck key/s.

But I am using the Osborne 1A keyboard to test since it works fine.

I swapped the A drive from the 1A to the 1 and now it boots.IMG_20230808_182902811.jpg


So it looks like both the floppy drives have issues in the Osborne 1.

What are the common things to look at on the Siemens floppy drives?

I heard the soldering on the boards can have issues so I guess that's the first thing to check out.

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I got my hands on two more floppy drives out of a Osborne 1A that is in the serial number range of 248,XXX and the DD board out of the same computer.

The chassis plastic has a date of Jan 83.

I was hoping they were the newer MPI drives that are working great in my second Osborne, it's a 1A, but oddly they are a pair of Siemens drives.

The chips on the floppy mainboards have late 82 date codes, and the main boards are slightly different but have the same part number.

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So I decided to service them, cleaned and oiled them and cleaned the read/write heads.

After that I decided to use the Gotek as my A drive and test the new to me drives both as B drives.

The A drive I removed the terminating resister and connected it it, nope it spins but errors out trying to access it or format.

I did the same with the other drive, it let me format but it gave only EEEEEEEEEEE's during the verification and one or more of the bearings are not happy.

So I decided to test the capacitors on the latest drives and the A drive has one maybe two shorted caps.

The B floppy board caps all tested good so I put the newer floppy circuit board on the orignial B drive and it works!! :cool:
 
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Works !!

Tested by formatting it.

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Next I inserted a known good SSSD floppy in the B drive and it reads no problem.

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Next I need to remove/replace the bad caps on the other newer drives circuit board and put it on the original drive and see if it works.

I guess with a Jan 83 build date Osborne was assembling with whatever drives they had.
 
Before I did anything else I installed the known good circuit board on the original A drive.

Works great!!

I also removed the tinted plastic screen shield for now but I will try to clean it and try to polish it up later.

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Next is to try to repair the other floppy board, it has a short somewhere on it but all the caps check out ok so more testing.
 
I just started to reassemble it tonight, ended up using a plain floppy drive adapter to mount the Gotek.
Hopefully in the next couple of weeks i'll be able to fix the floppy A drive board and reinstall it.

Waiting on some foam for the screen protector and waiting on my keyboard switches to finish the mechanical keyboard kit.

I just have the bezel in place unbolted for now and the keyboard should be done this weekend and then i'll test it out.

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Replaced the screen protector and plugged the mechanical keyboard in to test it.

I ordered the wrong switches but at least I can test it with a couple pairs of tweezers LOL.

It was real tedious but it works fine.

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Just finished soldering the key switches in.

I'm using Cherry Black switches except for the CAPS LOCK key switch, since it's the only one that clicks on the original keyboard and I wanted to duplicate that click.

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Since the off brand blue key switch did not have the two locating tabs I had to super glue it down to hold it so I could solder it.



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I ended up going with the older mechanical keyboard, the one I just discovered hiding in my Osborn 1A's keyboard housing. Works perfectly.

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To do: Fix the other floppy drive and also print a better floppy adapter for the Gotek. Add the double density floppy board and newer rom and install the 6mhz Z80 cpu to help with the temps.

Also since I swapped the keyboard guts from the Osborne 1A I needed to replace the keyboard internals.

The parts Osborne 1A has a good keyboard with very nice newer textured key caps that are not discolored at all so that was the perfect choice.

So that means both had keyboard upgrades.
 
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