On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Don Maslin wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, James Willing wrote:
> > On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Joe wrote:
> >
> > > I played with the Osbourne Executive yesterday. I can't get it to boot.
> > > All it says is "boot error". It says the same thing with no disks in it,
> > > MS DOS disks in it and with the door open so the message doesn't tell me
> > > anything.
> >
> > Well... from the description above, the first thing that comes to mind is
> > that the 'Executive', like all of the Osborne machines is a CP/M machine,
> > and will likely never run any form of MicroSquish DOS... B^}
> >
> > In more general terms, the message indicates that the unit is unable to
> > read the boot sector(s), but without a proper set of diskettes it will be
> > difficult to troubleshoot reliabily...
>
> I think you misread his message, Jim. What he was saying was that in
> addition to not booting on the CP/M disks and getting the error message,
> he also got the message with a DOS disk, with no disk, and even with the
> drive door open.
True enough... Failure to read between the lines sufficiently. B^}
> With all of those failure modes, it does not seem likely to me that it is
> a drive problem.
Yep... and the base machine won't give much more of an indication. The
Osbornes tended to think in a go/no-go mode, so the one 'catch-all' error
message is about all you would ever see.
I believe that the 'Exec used a WD1793 series floppy controller chip, so
the controller circuitry should be fairly straight forward.
-jim
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Received on Mon Sep 13 1999 - 17:21:57 BST