Hello again,
Thank you to all of you lovely people who offered to send me a disk with
DOS 3.3 in my recent problem of chicken-and-egg: getting DOS to my Apple
][ Europlus.
Well. I have now recieved said copies of software (thank you very *VERY*
much), so I went about booting the disks (I have two copies of the DOS
master disk, just in case). Unfortunately, the ][ just sits there on
startup with APPLE ][ on screen. Drive 1 moves the head back to the rear of
the drive (if not already there) and it tries to move it's self back even
further (is this called calibrating?!) - in doing so, the drive gives out a
(what I would call) slightly irregular thud, thud, thud sound. About 10 or
so of these thuds and the drive head ceases to move against it's stopper.
The drive motor continues to run however, until I hit RESET.
Both of my drives perform the same issue when they are set to be Drive 1. I
have 2 Drive ][ controller cards which both do the same thing. I have
stripped the drive of it's casing to see exactly what is happening but
everything (with exception of the heads simply moving back to the rear of
the drive and hitting against the stopper repeatedly) is normal. There are
no immediate signs of wear and I have ran a non-abrasive head cleaner
through the drive just in case.
If I manually push the heads to the front of the drive, then the drive
first of all pushes the heads to the back again, before resuming the normal
thudding, so it seems to know that its got to go back to the bottom to seek
for something.
Anyone any ideas as to why this is happening? Should I shell out the 20 or
so pounds on Ebay to buy a couple of new drives? I don't really think there
is that much wrong with these drives. Do you?
As always, many thanks in advance.
Alistair Ross