Date : Tue, 12 May 2009 10:54:35 +0100
From : bbcmailinglist@... (Ian Wolstenholme)
Subject: My Rodime Wont Spin
The Rodime in my Acorn Winchester 130 occasionally won't spin up. I
think it did it yesterday. There was no response from ADFS (went straight
to floppy) after I powered it up. I wasn't listening when I powered it on to
hear if it did all the usual squeaking, but I turned it off and on again and it
was fine.
I have had experience of manually turning drives, either by rotating the
motors a bit with the ones where it's accessible (like Miniscribe ones) or
by taking the lids off and rotating the disc platters.
I'm not saying it's GOOD experience, mind you, as it has resulted in several
broken discs so it's not recommended!
What errors are you getting with Superform? It should work off the controller
inside the Acorn Winchester. You need a version with the sector_bodge variable
set to 33 as the Acorn Winchester uses the MFM Adaptec ACB4000 controller.
This shouldn't make any difference to whether it formats though, all that happens
is that a Format Entire Media command is issued, so as long as the disc geometry
parameters are sensible, it should work.
Make sure that the ID on the drive is set to 0 and the 20-way ribbon cable is
plugged into J0 on the Adaptec board.
Best wishes,
Ian
----- Original Message -----
From: Julian Stenning [mailto:julian_stenning@...]
To: bbc-micro@...
Sent: Tue, 12 May 2009 08:31:08 +0000
Subject: [BBC-Micro] My Rodime Wont Spin
Hi -
Inspired by the recent activity on the list & the great show blogs/pictures,
I decided to get my Acorn gear out of the loft for an airing.
My beeb went bang after a couple of hours usage, which I kind of expected
(looks like C1 in the PSU has popped, I'll follow Sprows' website & list
archives instructions to repair that), but my biggest dissapointment is that
my old 30Mb Acorn winchester wont fire up.
The drive has always been very noisy with the bearing/motor sounding 'dry',
and now it seems its too stiff to spin. I can turn it manually, but that's
not enough to get it going. Has anyone had experience of dismantling & servicing
these things, or is it a bin-job?
Lastly, I do have an old Western Digital MFM 30Mb 'FileCard' drive (rescued
from an old Amstrad PC1640) that spins up when connected to the Acorn winchester
PSU and adaptec board, but Superform wont complete a format. The drive parameters
on the unit read 'H4, Wpc 783, Cyl 782, LZ 783, Spt 26'. Can I use this?
I seem to think I have in the past, but that may be a false memory.
Thanks,
Julian.
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