Date   : Mon, 12 Sep 2005 01:23:40 +0200
From   : "W.Scholten" <whs@...>
Subject: Re: BBC Stuff (Royal Russell)

John wrote:

> Is there anyone near-ish Purley CR8 that fancies coming around one evening
> with a 'good' drive and some good disks? Might it be a case of cleaning the
> drives - they sat under a desk for some years.

Probably. In the past, some drives that I thought were bad worked fine 
after cleaning the heads with alcohol (just reading a bunch of disks 
will usually work to remove junk; I keep a couple of bad disks for this 
purpose).

Alternatively, formatting errors can be caused by a bad disk controller 
and/or supporting ICs for a 8271. Also, I had similar problems with a 
machine with 8271 and support chips that were all socketed. Pressing on 
the ICs  made the problem go away.

-- 
Wouter
---
BBC computer/magazine scans:
   http://8-bit.summerfield-technology.co.uk/