From: Spiro Trikaliotis (ml-cbmhackers_at_trikaliotis.net)
Date: 2005-06-16 20:53:17
Hello,
first of all, I'd like to join the chorus celebrating "thank you" to
Marko and Bo for Funet in the past and in the future. ;-)
Secondly, I have had some "strange" experience, thus, I want to ask if
you had similar ones.
I always wanted to own a 1581 drive. Finally, I managed to get one -
errm... two, to be precise, but that's another story - from ebay.
The first one was declared as:
"It worked last time I used it with my C128. I sold it, but the one
getting it told me that it did not work. Thus, I took it back and sell
it as non-working now."
Ok, it was non-working, but it was much cheaper than any other (on eBay)
before. Perhaps, I would be able to repair it. If not, I might manage to
get another defective and end up with one working drive. Thus, I bid on
it and won.
Furthermore, I bid on a second 1581 declared as "working", and I bid
almost the same money for it as for the 1st one. I never thought I might
win this one (as 1581 go for > EUR 60 on german eBay), but I won that
one, too, for much less. Thus, I ended up with two of them. ;-)
The first one arrived first. I attached it to my PC, tried to get the
status of the drive: It worked. Next, I inserted a disk and tried to
format that one. This did not work. :-(
Thanks to Ray Carlsen's very good site - Ray, in case you read this mail
here, thank you very much for it! -, I was able to find out that the
1581 should start to move the R/W head when a PC formatted disk is
inserted. Thus, I opened the drive and switched it on. I could see the
R/W head start to "try" to move, but it did not move at all. According
to Ray's site, it should. I switched off the drive, tried to move the
R/W head by hand - as suggested by Ray, too - and find out the the first
move was *very* hard. It seems the head was "cant" ("verkanntet" in
German, I hope this is the right word in english).
Interestingly, after this first move, the drive works flawlessly! It
seems the drive did not like being sent by the post office.
Ok, the other day, the second drive arrived. I attached it to the PC. I
could get the status. Good. Next, I tried to read a directory. The disk
did not work. I tried to format the disk: Same thing, nothing worked.
As I was familiar with opening the drive now, I decided to open that
one, too. Here, I could spot the flaw much easier: The 4-pin power
plug of the drive itself was fallen from the header on the PCB. :-(
After putting it back, this drive works now flawlessly, too. The seller
insists the drive worked when it left him, and I tend to believe him -
it was very good packaged.
Thus, my experience is: Two 1581, and both seemed to be defective after
being sent by mail. Is this common, or did I just have "bad luck"? I'm
happy I happened to repair both, they might have gone to the garbage
otherwise, even with this very small flaws. If this is common, I do not
want to know how much 1581 go to waste because of this.
What are your experiences? Is this really normal?
Regards,
Spiro.
--
Spiro R. Trikaliotis
http://www.trikaliotis.net/
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