A couple of Bondwell 2 questions

From: Bill Dawson <whdawson_at_mlynk.com>
Date: Sun Nov 5 18:48:54 2000

I bought this CP/M laptop on eBay a couple of weeks ago for $9.99, with
another $13.70 for shipping and handling.

The laptop is in great condition, as described, well packed, and arrived
intact. The batteries are even OK and hold a decent charge.

I've done this eBay thing long enough to be able to read between the
lines and was fairly certain that it would not boot from the disk drive.
If it was able to, it would have said so in the listing. Sometimes what
is not said is as important as what is said.

It is now running great. I found two problems, the first caused the
second. The power connector for the floppy drive was on backwards.
What this means is that the +12 volt and +5 volt power lines were
swapped. The +5 applied to the +12 circuitry won't usually cause any
damage, but the +12 on the +5 will and did. The floppy was unable to
seek because there was no power to the head stepper motor because there
was no power to the stepper motor controller IC. Q1 ( I think it is a
small SCR, since its three legs are marked S, G and D) which
switches/regulates power to the stepper IC seems inop. When I short the
S and G leads, the controller IC gets +5V, the stepper motor works and
the floppy drive functions. The Bondwell now will boot, format and copy
disks. The only markings on Q1, TO-92'ish, are A854 (date code or
2SA854?) and S G D. I think this device is in the circuit to save
power; perhaps when the floppy is not selected, the head stepper is left
to float free. Correct me if I'm wrong about this. The floppy is an
early 720K DSDD (even though the Bondwell is only SSDD) Epson SMD-180B.

Question #1. Does anyone have schematics for this drive?

Also, I tried to build a custom disk definition for the Bondwell 2 for
22disk v1.44. I used Anadisk to evaluate the Bondwell floppy format,
and it says the floppies are single-sided, 18 sector, 256 byte sector
size, and the interleave is 2 to 1, i.e. 0,9,1,10,2,11,etc. I made one
freshly formatted floppy on the Bondwell and only put dump.asm and
dump.com on it (I also sysgenned it and made it bootable). Using
Anadisk, I can see the directory, and the 2-1 skew that Anadisk reports
allows me to read dump.asm in its correct order. However, the disk
definition that I built for 22disk doesn't work. I can read the
directory and I can copy the files to DOS, but they appear as if the
interleave is incorrect, since dump.asm is jumbled on 256 byte
boundaries. The entire file _is_ present. I didn't have any more time
last night to check and see just _how_ it is jumbled.

Question #2. Does anyone have the disk definition for 22disk for the
Bondwell 2?

Bill
Received on Sun Nov 05 2000 - 18:48:54 GMT