Paul,
I probably just bought the Quaderno you were thinking about off ebay uk. I had ummed and ahhed over this as the original reserve price was something silly like £40.
Whilst the machine was faulty as advertised (no response from the hard disk) it was at least in excellent physical condition.
I spent much of yesterday afternoon trying to fix it. Firstly by dismantling it to pull the 2.5" 20MB hard drive which I put in another machine using a standard 2.5" - 3.5" converter. No joy there as the drive wouldn't even spin (I could at least hear it spinning inside the assembled Quaderno). By which I think we can assume the Conner 2.5" drive (one of the first ever in this form-factor) doesn't have a modern IDE spec compatible pin-out.
Then having read a bit more on the 'net I saw some posts referring to how the Conner drive heads can become stuck if the drive is left unused for many months (or years). The recommended fix for this (I kid you not) was to give the drive a few really good slaps side on. Amazingly this did the trick.
Following reassembly the machine booted-up straight into Olivetti branded DOS 5.0 and even let me run Norton Utilities and Lotus Works which were still installed on the hard disk. Result!
Hints for diagnosing and fixing this problem in other Quaderno’s are that hard disk can be heard to spin-up but that the BIOS self-test reports only 1 fixed disk found. This is the ROM drive not the hard drive itself. If the hard disk is working the machine will report 2 fixed disks.
The instructions on how to disassemble the Quaderno came from Sven Utcke’s website:
http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~utcke/Private/Palmtop/quaderno-assembly.html
and are reproduced below in case Sven’s very old website ever disappears:
Disassembling the Quaderno (21-Jul-1999) (c) Sven Utcke
Disassembling the Quaderno is actually quite easy, given its small size. All
that is needed is a small Phillips screwdriver:
Remove the Keyboard. The keyboard is held by a screw behind the port-door (on
the right), a screw below a pop-off plastic part on the left of the keyboard,
and a pop-off plastic part on the right of the keyboard. In addition, it is
connected to the main unit by two cables which fit into zero-force connectors
on the mainboard.
My keyboard is labelled:
MODEL: NO TWK4716-01C
PGS: NO 701009-04
SERIAL: NO 00000310
DATE: 92.03.13
Remove the numeric keypad (including function keys) and screen. This is held
by three screws at the back of the unit (behind plastic peel-off labels) and
three screws inside the battery compartment. It is also connected to the
mainboard by three cables which fit into zero-force connectors, and one ground
cable screwed to the mainboard. Be careful when removing these, as the screen
is connected to the rest of the computer by only three screws, all at the left
of the unit, and screwed into a rather fragile bit of plastic. Chances are
that the plastic broke a long time ago and everything will come apart at once.
You can use 2 components [Epoxy] glue to form a new thread if necessary.
The HDD is held by two screws at the right of the HDD. It is not soldered to
the unit, but connected using a plug. One ground cable is screwed to the
mainboard. My HDD is labelled:
Conner CP-2024
5V 640mA
K0WW35
CP2024
OLV02
9203
BE 56421
KAT2.38 SG3 N
business process management
This is all I have done so far.
Sven Utcke
Finally, for anyone trying to install software, but who doesn’t have an external floppy unit, then provided you can get the hard disk working the easiest way is using PCMCIA type 1 SRAM cards. My machine will read a standard 1MB FAT12 formatted SRAM card with the installed Microsoft Card Services.
Hope this helps others.
