Elan
Member
Hi everyone,
I have a problem with the floppy disk drive in the Model 70 at work. Basically, 2 days ago it was reading and writing without any problems, and now as of yesterday, it has become a floppy killer:
Step 1: Insert floppy, try to read or write to disk. I get the classic Abort, Retry, Fail message, and after a few desperate stabs of the 'r' key, 'a'bort and return to the U: drive.
Step 2: Insert floppy into any other computer, try to read or write to or format disk. Everything fails. Floppy now useless.
This is upsetting. The drive is a standard YD-701-6062 IBM 1.44 3.5 Floppy Drive (and the computer runs XENIX 386 OS 2.3.4, with some strange VP/ix 1.2 DOS emulator which runs DOS 3.3).
Does anyone know if there is any basic maintenance I can do to my floppy drive to bring it back to life? Some well known issue with these drives which is easily fixed (why yes, I am grasping at straws).
As I am new to these forums, a bit of background:
The Model 70 is in my lab at university, and is the main interface and controller of an old PerkinElmer ELAN 5000 ICP/MS (Inductively Coupled Plasma - Mass Spectrometer). I use the Elan to analyse heavy metals drinking water, surface water, waste water etc.
After analysis, I transfer the raw data from the Model 70 via floppy to a modern (Windows XP) computer to crunch the numbers and generate usable data summaries. The software on the Model 70 can generate its own summary, but its not as useful as all the raw data and the summary I bully Excel to create with VBA. Its a lot of numbers (sometimes 10s of thousands of rows once in Excel), so I really need to transfer the data directly.
Basically, if I can't fix the old floppy drive, I will need to find a new one (it has some sort of tray around it with a weird flat connector, or start exploring parallel / serial connections from the Model 80 to my modern machine (I struggle to get a windows machine networked to another windows machine, so not sure how I am meant to network a XENIX machine - although I don't mind creating a Linux partition on my work windows machine if it will make the data transfer easier :-/ ).
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks for your help,
Malcolm
I have a problem with the floppy disk drive in the Model 70 at work. Basically, 2 days ago it was reading and writing without any problems, and now as of yesterday, it has become a floppy killer:
Step 1: Insert floppy, try to read or write to disk. I get the classic Abort, Retry, Fail message, and after a few desperate stabs of the 'r' key, 'a'bort and return to the U: drive.
Step 2: Insert floppy into any other computer, try to read or write to or format disk. Everything fails. Floppy now useless.
This is upsetting. The drive is a standard YD-701-6062 IBM 1.44 3.5 Floppy Drive (and the computer runs XENIX 386 OS 2.3.4, with some strange VP/ix 1.2 DOS emulator which runs DOS 3.3).
Does anyone know if there is any basic maintenance I can do to my floppy drive to bring it back to life? Some well known issue with these drives which is easily fixed (why yes, I am grasping at straws).
As I am new to these forums, a bit of background:
The Model 70 is in my lab at university, and is the main interface and controller of an old PerkinElmer ELAN 5000 ICP/MS (Inductively Coupled Plasma - Mass Spectrometer). I use the Elan to analyse heavy metals drinking water, surface water, waste water etc.
After analysis, I transfer the raw data from the Model 70 via floppy to a modern (Windows XP) computer to crunch the numbers and generate usable data summaries. The software on the Model 70 can generate its own summary, but its not as useful as all the raw data and the summary I bully Excel to create with VBA. Its a lot of numbers (sometimes 10s of thousands of rows once in Excel), so I really need to transfer the data directly.
Basically, if I can't fix the old floppy drive, I will need to find a new one (it has some sort of tray around it with a weird flat connector, or start exploring parallel / serial connections from the Model 80 to my modern machine (I struggle to get a windows machine networked to another windows machine, so not sure how I am meant to network a XENIX machine - although I don't mind creating a Linux partition on my work windows machine if it will make the data transfer easier :-/ ).
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks for your help,
Malcolm