Back to sureality
(That’s a surreal reality if you weren’t sure)
We gotta DRIVE this home
So the next step is getting the drives online. I was actually very disconcerted when I found the drives in the storage unit. I found 2 disk drives without covers and with power supplies, and 2 drives without any sort of power supply (Or, by extension, covers). I would have sworn up, down, left, right and middle that I was running 4 drives when I packed this away. I realized there may have been parts left behind, so I made another trip to the storage place
Given the amount of cleanup/cleanout, I wasn’t hopeful. But I went into EVERY leftover box, every drawer, every shelf in the unit. No Bell Dataphone 212A (Really was hoping to find this for nostalgia sake) , found a box of various disks so thats a win but no other power supplies or the disk covers. I’m positive I had 4, so not sure what happened, but if it wasn’t in the unit it wasn’t going to be available. Ok, well, I am hoping that 99% of what I’m after is on the hard drive, so just having 2 drives isn’t going to be a big deterrent.
Which is better, this…or this…
My first instincts were “The stepping is going to be horrible” , “The band probably has a permanent hump where its been sitting for 40 years on the motor spindle” and “The heads are probably SOOOO out of alignment” . So, once again I took to the interwebs as its been called to look for someone to help. Sadly, people just weren’t into it. Most of the replies were just “Clean them up, they rarely go out of alignment”. Great, more unknown status equipment going onto the system. Well, its done me ok so far, lets let it run its course.
I took everything apart to clean them. I did put a meter on the power plugs and got the proper 12V and 5V as expected, so at least that was in good shape.
(And here comes another cleaning montage)
I’m going in, CABLE ME!
Since I was able to also source the 4 drive cable off eBay from the same person I’ve been getting a lot of my items. Ian Mavric of TRS-80 Universe. So I plugged in the one end into the expansion interface, and first card edge connector oriented with pin 1 in the right place. I turned on the disk drive. No smoke, that’s a start. So then I turned on the monitor, Expansion Interface and just about to do the main unit when I remembered “I have a disk drive, no BREAK needed”. So I threw caution to the wind and turned it on. AND THE DRIVE PERKED UP AND TRIED TO DO SOMETHING!!!
The most awful noise I’ve heard in QUITE a while
It sounded like it was grinding the head into a stone, and what you hear in a truck when you don’t know how to shift a manual transmission. I teared up, this was the breaking (Or more likely broken) part.
Maybe like me in the morning, it just needed a bit of moving around to get it going ok. I had found a diskette cleaning kit along with my floppies
So figured if it was going to grind, it could clean itself too. I opened up the “Head Cleaning Minidisk” and to absolute astonishment and amazement (Nah, just kidding) it was a dry as something really really dry. I expected it, but had a secret plan. I poured some of the 99.9% Isopropyl Alcohol from before into the packet and rotated the disk until it was nice and wet. I put it into the carrier, and ran it a few times making it look for a disk. I felt after 3 tries it was clean enough. Looking at the disk it was still in fairly good shape, so I thought “Lets throw caution to the wind”
Windy caution
I thought about using one of my disks, but worried that as has been stated before, “On a disk that old you probably have 1 good read cycle on it before it goes to heck”. I wanted to save my disks, I’d need them. But how to test? Fortunately, dr_ians_junque on eBay had the answer. We haven’t touched on it yet, but I was also worried the RS-232 board wasn’t going to work, so I bought a spare one. With that spare, Ian sent a disk
And it seemed to be self booting. So, I put it in, closed the door, and pressed the reset.
TA and EFFING da
I was presented with a Smal-LDOS screen!
So I went to type the date, and, well, that was pretty hysterical. It only took MM/DD/YY format. I put in 09/27/23, but this is what I got –
It appears somehow 23 became 87. Oh well, it worked. AND , confirmed my LC was working in the main unit. Two for one, sweet!
But I was able to do a DIR, and other DOSy things. WHOO HOO! The streak continues.
So close I can taste it (Tastes sweet)
This is REALLY really close. I cleaned the 2nd drive, put it on the cable, and put a floppy I didn’t care about in. IT READ IT TOO! NICE! I’m so so close. Or am I?
