A couple of Bondwell 2 questions

From: Don Maslin <donm_at_cts.com>
Date: Sun Nov 5 22:22:43 2000

On Sun, 5 Nov 2000, Bill Dawson wrote:

> 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?

No, but I do have the disk image and I'll see if I can work up the disk
definition for you.
                                                 - don
 
> Bill
>
>
Received on Sun Nov 05 2000 - 22:22:43 GMT