Date   : Mon, 09 Jul 1990 11:40:36 PDT (Monday)
From   : Sprague.WBST311@Xerox.COM
Subject: Help needed with TeleVideo TS-804

An old college buddy of mine picked up a TeleVideo TS-804, complete with a
tape backup unit (TS-806C), and an extra terminal.  He knew nothing about
it other than he thought it was CP/M and asked me to take a look at it when
I stopped by his place on my vacation over the forth.

It booted up fine for me (his wife thought she had screwed the hard disk
up), and I found out that it was running MP/M II.  I had no problem looking
into different things and showing he and his wife how to use it.  We
started cleaning out all the garbage left over from the previous owners
WordStar letters and memos (I was rather surprised to find that this
company information had not been deleted).  While my buddy had gotten most
of the documentation that went with this system, (except for the MP/M
Manuals and the TS-804 Technical Reference Manual) the ONLY floppy disk he
had gotten was the WordStar Master disk.  As I have never messed with MP/M
before some things were not obvious.

Anyway, the following morning, the system would not boot up.  It came out
of Diagnostics and said:

WDC NOT READY ERROR

I assume WDC means Winchester Drive Controller, but this error message does
not give me enough information to tell if it is a problem with the Hard
Drive, or the Hard Drive Controller.  Does anybody know?  We opened the
case, and did the obvious things ... look for anything out of place, check
all the connectors, and so on, but still it would not boot.  Since we had
no bootable floppies ......

After we had given up, his wife flicked the power switch off an on one more
time (Yes, I know about Shift/ Break Break), and suddenly everything came
up.  We grabbed some floppies and started formatting them.  I then used
WRITESYS on several of them, to create bootable disks.  I made up a
WordStar disk, so that they could use the computer even if the hard drive
would not work. For now anyway, word processing is the main thing they want
to do with it.

I continued cleaning up the hard drive, and backing some of the software up
on floppies.  Later on into the evening, the thing started acting funny ...
telling me that there were no files on floppies that I KNEW had files on
them.  I rebooted it, and got some sort of disk error.  Since a bunch of
other old college buddies had showed up, we did not do anything else.

The next day, again it would not boot up ... same problem.  I was pretty
sure by that time that I knew why he had gotten it so cheap ... and why
none of the companies files had been deleted.  :-)

I tried booting from some of the floppies, and discovered that MPM.SYS was
also needed for the bloody thing to boot.  Grumble, my inexperience with
MP/M got me.  All I had to do was get the thing to boot once, and I could
take care of that problem ... of course, it wouldn't boot until his wife
flipped the power switch one more time ... when I had the car all packed
and ready to leave for home.

This time, it wouldn't come up though.  This time it said:

MPMLDR error: Dsk rd err

I assume this means that it had read problems while trying to start/run the
MP/M loader?  That's all it would do from that point on.  So, here we were
with a hard drive that wouldn't boot, containing the one file needed to
make the floppies boot.  Catch-22.

So ..... could anyone tell me any more about the WDC error?  Would anyone
have an MP/M system disk, or at least an MPM.SYS file for the TeleVideo
TS-804?  If we can boot from a floppy, I am pretty sure we can get at the
files on the hard drive .... or at least they can still use WordStar from a
floppy.

Out of curiosity, is it still possible to get MP/M?

                               ~ Mike (Sprague.Wbst311@Xerox.Com)