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Sudden Revival

carlsson

Veteran Member
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
6,274
Location
Västerås, Sweden
The last few days, I've been fiddling with my broken VIC and C64. I was about to pick up another C64 motherboard (from the PET place), but found none that was fully functional, so I didn't bother. After all, I have a functional C64C.

Anyway, I decided to power on my old breadbox 64 to see if I could diagnose an error.. Lo and behold, it boots up just fine! Keyboard works, disk drive works, memory works. It seems the previous fault might've been with the PSU I used back then, not delivering enough power out of a sudden.

So, now I have gone from one to two C64:s, and from one to two or three VIC-20:s. I think I should nick-name this old breadbox "Jesus", because it just ascended from the dead without no outer changes, not even need to change the fuse...
 
I think its the weather. I was fiddling around with my 360K floppy drive that did not read anything yesterday, and suddenly it just booted, no problem!

Altough later that day first occasional read errors occured, and then it wasn't able to read the (same) disc anymore.
 
You mean global warming the past 10 years or so has made the climate warm enough to make my C64 work again? Woo. Imagine how many computers will start working in the following years, when it will get even warmer.
 
It is freaking amazing, but I brought home a CBM 720 (B256) earlier. After a few hours of operation, the computer said pzzzt, the screen begun to flicker and died. I thought that was the last I would see of that particular computer, at least until I repaired whatever was wrong.

Tonight, a few months later, I decided to power it up to see if the screen at least still functions. Believe it or not, but it boots up nicely into Basic again. No signs of damage. Either it was temporary, or this particular machine gets instable when it has been running for too long and gets hot.

That means only at my place, this week I have had two previously thought broken computers fully functional only by turning them on. Is it the weather?!?!
 
Absolutely. The temperature is so high it must have soldered some broken prints.
 
Or the humidity. I brought the previous incarnation of HAL from TN after it had died, to be salvaged later after the move, and I decided to fire it back up here, just to see what would happen-- and it worked for another year! I guess the humidity in TN did it, and the lack of humidity revived it.
 
Tonight I have successfully installed Debian (that is a different story) and got to compile e-uae. I managed to mount the raw image from my old Amiga hard disk (now no longer operational), and will soon attach a different (larger) 2.5" disk to the computer and try to restore the partitions onto it. There seems not to be any other tools to restore a disk image to a disk of a different size, but as long as the emulator method works, I'm ok.

That will make one more revived computer. I'm lucky the old disk was readable enough to take a backup when I did. Shortly thereafter it seems to have gone to hard disk heaven forever.

Edit: Oh, the irony. After partitioning the second hard disk on my Amiga and detach it, some pins fell deep into the connector. I managed to pull them straight with a pair of pliers, but for some reason the disk no longer is detected, neither on the Amiga or the PC. I'll see if it can be fixed, or I'm going shopping for another 60-~400 MB 2.5" disk.
 
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