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New Lisa! Restortion tips needed.

harry said:
Hi Tez, just been catching up on things and noticed you have some new toys! "all that comes to he who waits" nice finds indeed. these should keep you busy. I too have a lisa 2 that took a lot of time and effort to get working. (but now needs a psu repair) You probably have read lots about getting the floppy drive working, and they do require removing and dismantling. they are very mechanical, and all linkages must operate freely. once removed and cleaned, it is easy to insert and remove any floppy disk , to see that all linkages are working properly. I spent a lot of time to free up the dried greased parts. but once everything was cleaned and lubricated, the drive worked like new! best of luck Harry.
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Hi Harry,

Thanks for responding.

Yes, the Lisa was a machine I wanted and it's great to have one (or three!). I love the modular design with the plug in backplane. So easy to work on!

Were your drives totally dead? Yes, I've read a bit from Lisa documents about getting these drives going but not where the drive seems to be making no attempt at all at rotating or ejecting. Yet I can manually eject the disk easily, move the heads on the rails and even spin the flywheel. There is no sign of any of the three drives is straining to do anything when they should be though. They just sit there in stubborn silence?

You might be right though. The force of my finger may be far greater than any electrical impulses and maybe things are not as free as they should be (they seem free enough?). Those drives certainly look complicated with all sorts of springs and mechanisms. I do have some disassembly docs but I'm loath to dismantel them until I am sure siezed joints are the problem.

Next step might be to check out the readings on the drive card edge and see if they reveal some clues...

Tez
 
Tez, when I collected my machine there was a floppy stuck in the drive, and it appeared the drive was dead, It does not take much to remove the drive, take off the metal casing, and I used a small paint brush and wd 40 penetrating fluid, to clean all old grease from everything. the lead screw on the head was also gummed up, when you slide the disk in and out everything has to be really free to move! certainly check out signals, but I should stress how these drives must be free to operate.The early mac I have, had to have the same treatment and works perfectly now. you don't need to dismantle much at all to carry out the cleaning and lubing. ............Harry
 
harry said:
....the lead screw on the head was also gummed up, ....
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Hi Harry,

I dismantled one of the drives last night. The eject mechanism was reasonably free anyway, but it's even freer now with some alcohol cleaning and silicon grease. However, I think the stepper motor at least might be seized up. After degreasing and lubing this, I find I can slide the head on the rails but rather than turning the stepper screw it instead bounces over the top of the threads.

I'm suspect this is not suppose to happen, right? Thinking back to my 5.25 inch drive lube experiences whenever I moved the head, the stepper screw turned with it.

Even if the stepper was jammed would that stop it ejecting disks or spinning them though? As I say, although the little LEDs are on, they don't make any noise of show any sign of life at all. Hopefully their motors aren't burnt out.

I haven't taken any measurements on the LisaLite cards yet. Looking at a circuit diagram I see these are very simple cards with most of the lines actually going straight through to the drives. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out if the signal is getting lost in there somewhere.

Over this week I'll take LisaLite measurements and disassemble/lube the two other drives. I feel I'm tantilisingly near to having a working Lisa yet still so far away at the moment.

Of course the one I'd really like to get going is the Lisa 2/10. It comes up with a I/O board error message 57 on the screen. Does anyone know exactly what the IC(s) are connected to this number? Docs say the LisaLite card. That makes sense on the Lisa 2 but on the Lisa 2/10 this functionality has been transferred to the main I/O board. I'm not sure exactly where though? Maybe the two chips second and third in from the top left?

Tez
 
Problem solved. HD disks make drives appear dead

Problem solved. HD disks make drives appear dead

Problem solved on the Lisa 2!

As I don't have any software yet, I was using a HD 3.5 inch disk as a tester just to see if the Lisa passed all disagnostic tests and the drive spun (and was ejected). The drive didn't spin or eject so I considered it dead.

Turns out that this morbidity was caused by the HD disk. I don't know for sure (docs are hard to come by on this Sony drive) but the suspicion is that there is a light sensor in the drive used to detect a disk which just happens to align with the density indicator hole in the HD disk. As the light shines through the hole, the drive assumes no disk is present and does nothing? With a DD disk, everything spins and ejects as it should!

I didn't discover this myself. A poster on the cctalk list suggesting this was possibly the problem from his experiences with other Sony drives. I was skeptical but tried the Lisa when I got home from work with a DD disk and volia! Spin and spit!

I'm still not sure the Lisa 2 is completely working. I've got to get a copy of Macworks and see if it runs, and also check out all the keyboard keys. It looks hopeful though!

In the meantime I'll turn my attention to the second Lisa, the Lisa 2/10 with the I/O board error. I want to get that widget drive booting and see that Lisa Office Suite! :)

Many thanks to those that contributed.

Tez
 
I also have a Lisa 2/10 that I'm restoring. I rescued it from a university when they closed their computer repair department. It had been sitting on a shelf for years along with various printers, monitors, and computers they were saving for parts. I asked about it once, but they wouldn't sell it. Fortunately, when they were cleaning out the shop after they closed for good, I noticed it in a basket of things to be scrapped. Fortunately, it was unharmed and still have the Macworks XL box on top.

So far, I've cleaned and lubricated the floppy drive, and replaced a leaky cap in the reset circuit that was preventing it from POSTing. It was originally a Mac XL, so I replaced the ROMs with Lisa 2/10 versions and disconnected the extra transformer in yoke circuit (undoing the square pixel "screen mod"). Now I can boot to Mac OS using Macworks, or to the Lisa OS installation disks.

It works fine with a Mac 128k/512k/plus mouse. I think my keyboard is bad, but I haven't opened it up yet. Hopefully it's just a broken cable.

The big remaining problem is that my internal hard drive is bad. It spins up, but just sits there seeking every few seconds. When booting, it tries to boot from the hard drive, but fails with an error. I can't get the Macworks, or Lisa OS disk utility to format the drive.

I acquired it about 5 years ago, and it has been in storage for 4 years due to a long distance move. The move is complete, and when I recently tested it, it was still working (apart from the dead hard drive).
 
andy said:
It works fine with a Mac 128k/512k/plus mouse. I think my keyboard is bad, but I haven't opened it up yet. Hopefully it's just a broken cable.
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Andy, I think this is a common problem. Apparently there are pads inside them that distintergrate. A google around will reveal some remedies.

I suspect my keyboards are not-working. Hard to test until I've got some software for the Lisa 2 that now at least spins it's floppy.

Tez
 
Andy, you might be able to answer a question for me. Will a Lisa 2/10 boot just from it's floppy if the hard disk is disconnected?

This will be a useful fact to know as I go about diagnosing the fault in this 2/10 of mine.

Tez
 
tezza said:
Andy, you might be able to answer a question for me. Will a Lisa 2/10 boot just from it's floppy if the hard disk is disconnected?

This will be a useful fact to know as I go about diagnosing the fault in this 2/10 of mine.

Tez
Click to expand...

I can't remember if I have tried booting it with the hard drive disconnected, but the bad hard drive doesn't prevent it from booting. If it can't boot from the hard drive, it should present you with a list of boot devices and allow you to click on the floppy drive. I'll try it with the hard drive disconnected the next time I do something with it.
 
Thanks Andy,

After more poking around with the scope I'm almost sure this fault I have is either the IWM chip or the ROM on the I/O board. Next step is to try to source either part so I can at least swap them to determine which one (and verify that it is indeed one of these).

Then there is the small problem of actually getting a replacement part of course. Arcadecomponents has an IWM at least.

I'm working on tracking down Lisa owners in New Zealand not only for the above, but also to see if I can get some LISA software.

Tez
 
I have an EPROM programmer, and I will be making backups of the ROMs soon. If anyone needs the files, feel free to contact me.
 
Well, with the help of an Apple Classic 2, a 800k external drive, some software called Transmac and web-sourced -disk images I managed to make myself some Macwork disks for my Lisa 2.

The good news is that it boots sucessfully from the floppy drive! Yay! The bad news is that all THREE of my Lisa keyboards don’t work. A common problem with old Lisa keyboards but fixable.

Anyway, I’m getting there!

I’m also working on getting the Lisa 2/10 going as well. I hope to do more work on this second machine after Xmas.

Tez
 
Nice writeup. You said that you use parts from one to make the other two work, right? Does the "donor" unit still ahve a presumably working analog board you are willing to trade? I've given up on finding the fault in mine.
 
tezza said:
I’m also working on getting the Lisa 2/10 going as well. I hope to do more work on this second machine after Xmas.
Click to expand...

Progress! The Lisa 2/10 now gets to the boot stage! The fault was the IWM Apple 344-0041 (Integrated WOZ machine controller). However, the widget drive itself throws up an error. First things first though. I'll source a replacement IWM chip, then worry about the widget drive. It might just need some exercise.

I diagnosed the faulty chip with the help of a friend who owns a Lisa 2/10. He bought a couple of chips of interest (the I/O board IWM and the ROM) to swap out with the suspects in my machine. He also had an IDEFile ProFile drive emulator which we hooked up to my working Lisa 2. Whoo hoo, it was great to see the Lisa Office Suite boot
into action. It looked very cool and in 1983 it would have looked even
cooler!

Tez
 
Progress on the Lisas. The Lisa 2/10 boots but both the floppy drive and the widget have issues. Unfortunately further repair looks difficult.

The widget certainly spins and I can hear a definte clack when the break comes off. I can hear drive seeking noises and the light flashes. I then get an "Error 82". From what I can read this is a fairly generic error which just means the internal drive is not working properly. I've tried to install the Lisa Office Suite and Macworks XL 3.0 from floppy. In the former case I'm told there is no suitable hard disk to install on, and the latter throws up an error 96. I've reseated all socketed chips to no avail. It could be a case of just requiring a low-level format, but I can't find anything on the web that suggests anyone actually knows how to do this. For those who have never seen a widget, this is what it looks like:

2011-02-04-widget-apple-lisa-2-10.jpg


The floppy drive has a issue where the motor simply doesn't turn sometimes. I've done some diagnostic work. It's not the switch or lubrication but it seems to be a problem on the circuit board. Oddly my spare 400k drive (from the spare-parts Lisa) has exactly the same problem? This means between my three Lisas I only have one working 400k drive.

The plan at this stage is to seek another 400k drive rather than try to repair it. I'm also looking at this item to replace the widget.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Profile-Widget-Emul ... 0494480628. I friend loaned me his older (Profile) model for the working Lisa 2 and I'm impressed. Very pricey though. I'll need to sell some of my other stuff to justify it to the significant other.

What I'm aiming for is one working Lisa showing the Lisa Office Suite which I can exibit. The Lisa 2/10 is best for this as I can hide the widget emulator inside and it still looks (although not sounds) just like it did in the day. The restored Lisa 2 I'll try and sell to help finance what I've spent on the project so far.

Tez
 
Whoo hoo,

The Lisa 2/10 is now up and running. The X/Profile emulator works like a dream. What a great piece of hardware. Here's a pic of the X/Profile emulator mounted in the widget cage and the Lisa running the office suite.


x-profile mounted-800x600.jpg



lisa2-10-showing Lisa Office Suite v2.jpg

Only one thing left to do. Repair a 400k floppy drive so I can have BOTH Lisas fully working. I think the problem has been diagnosed and I'm just waiting on parts.

Tez
 
Just an update re the non-working 400k drive for the second Lisa.

Got the parts --> installed the parts ---> Symptom still persists.

It looks like I might have to be content with just one fully working Lisa. Yet having TWO working Lisas is just a 400k drive away.

So near yet so far *sigh*

Tez
 
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