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Re: Weird Smartport problem



Jayson Smith wrote:
I have a GS ROM 01. I was playing with cables and suchlike last night, and now I have a problem, a strange one. The system can read 5.25 and 3.5 disks just fine. But it can't write them. In fact, anytime it tries to write anything to a disk, that track I guess gets corrupted, and the disk is corrupt, and needless to say, I/O error! I'm pretty sure it's the smartport at fault and not the disk drives, because I unhooked all my drives and hooked up another 5.25 drive alone, and it did the same thing! Reads fine, but eats data when it writes. Any thoughts about what might be going on? If it's a component on the MB blown, what is it? Should I just scrap this GS and get another one? If so, does anybody have use for a GS that can't write disks. My CFFA Microdrive works fine on it.
Thanks for any help.
Jayson

You don't mention whether any of your cable swaps were done with
the power on...that could easily fry the SWIM chip.

And if the power was off, then the season's low humidity is quite
conducive to electrostatic charges and consequent ESD damage to
the same chip.  (It has several pins directly connected to the
smartport connector.)

If you can find a replacement chip, it would be a shame to write
off the whold MB.  ;-(

-michael

NadaNet and AppleCrate II: parallel computing for Apple II computers!
Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon

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