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Found a Osborne Vixen/4, just says "Insert Disk in Drive A..." at boot

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new2This

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Feb 2, 2025
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Hey so was at a charity shop and found some old looking "non working" computer for 30 bucks called an Osborne 4/vixen. Everything seems to work but it

Now, I will need some hand holding. Ive never even seen a floppy disk before. For some reason the two floppy drives would cause it not to boot, assuming a burnt cap. So i removed them and it booted to "Insert Disk in drive A...". I found something called goteks and installed flash floppy on it. Now quite frankly Im lost, i used this http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/img42841/system.htm, converted it to .img using his tool then threw it onto the usb with the relevant vixen .cfg from their github
Still "Insert Disk in drive A...".

Perhaps the enter key was broken? I took it apart and its getting there there is a voltage from the enter key so it seems like something is happening? I am utterly lost
 
rlauzon said:
You need someone to make you a set of boot disks. Or you replace the A: drive with a Gotek and use one of the disk images available on the Internet.
Click to expand...
I have a goteks... forgive me god, for I have sinned. I sent the link of the website I used for the img, but still no boot

1738543851848.png
 

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ldkraemer said:
Ah, you need to use the HxC Software to create the *.hfe file and put that on the USB Stick.

See Attached.

REMOVE the RAW image and add the *.hfe image.



Larry
Click to expand...
Hey, quick sanity check.

Do you know if at the "Please insert disk..." Screen, when I hit enter. Is anything meant to happen if I dont have a disk?
Like it says "Error no disk inserted" Or something
 
I don't think it will accept a keyboard input until it is satisfied with a floppy. It is locked up in
a loop looking for the floppy.

Larry
 
I think when you press RETURN it should select the first disk drive and attempt to boot from it.

However, I am not sure whether the Gotek has an LED indicating that the drive is actually selected.

The probability (in this case) is that you can't tell whether the Osborne keyboard is not working and/or he Gotek configuration. Catch 22 I am afraid.

Just checking for some random voltage across the keys does not tell you whether the keyboard is being processed.

I suppose the dumb question is, what is wrong with the original disk drives? Was it just one (or both) that were faulty?

You should be able to boot from either floppy.

By the way, welcome to VCFED. I will have a look at the technical manual tomorrow...

Dave
 
Hey! thank you dave!

Unsure about both the floppy drives. The pc would refuse to boot with them on. I assume some short on them. Then one of the capacitors popped in them. Testing them individually caused the computer to not boot (and thats when one of their caps popped).

I have the schematics, I am going to pop my head in the EE lab tomorrow and see if I can nerd snipe someone? I am completely lost here
 
Wanna double your money? 🙂 Seriously though, great find and I hope you get it working. I would be surprised if it doesn't boot once you get the right arrangement of things sorted with the gotek.
 
Post what you have for the vixen.cfg, and what firmware you are running? Flashfloppy or HxC?

Here is what I conjured up for the Vixen.

Code: 
#Flashfloppy/GOTEK
[osb8]
cyls = 80
heads = 2
secs = 5
interleave = 2
bps = 1024
id = 1
#rpm = 360
rpm = 300
rate = 250
mode = mfm
iam = no

Larry
 
daver2 said:
However, I am not sure whether the Gotek has an LED indicating that the drive is actually selected.
Click to expand...

Personally I wouldn't run Flashfloppy without the OLED display modification. The displays can be had for about a dollar each and are worth every penny. They let you know you're on the right image, show drive activity, and even show what track you're on so you can see if, say, the machine freezes in a particular place *after* it's started booting.
 
Welcome. And being lost is part of the fun of this hobby, right? There is lots of information available for the Osborne so I'm sure, with patience, you will get all sorted out. I would look into the correct setting for your GoTek as a possible fault. But I don't use one myself so I can only speculate. I'm sure there are several config options that can either lead to faults or success.

Seaken
 
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