Hi,
Dusting off my old Diamond system the other day got me thinking about trying to
resurrect my Phillips P3800 (some sort of multi-user CP/M platform, early 80's
I believe). It's another garage resident that I acquired a few years ago and
then never had time to restore.
It had been the victim of a basement flood when I got it and was dead as a dodo
- plus the hard drive had roasted itself (I believe when the previous owner
turned it on when it was still soaking wet, which is always such a very good
idea...)
I'm going from memory here, but believe that the hard drive is an ST225 - and
the main logic board on the base of the unit was pretty well charred. What I
did was find an identical model working drive and use its logic board with the
frame and platters from the drive in the Phillips unit. Am I wasting my time
even trying that? Or, assuming the data is intact on the platters still and
survived the flooding, might I get a usuable drive by trying that? Maybe the
logic boards are calibrated against some of the mechanical components within
the drive for all I know.
When I tried this the drive would at least then spin up (using a standard PC
power supply for testing), but without fixing the power supply in the Philips
and figuring out how to connect something to it (there's a whole pile of cables
hanging out the back, to one of which presumably some sort of console connects)
I don't yet know if I can actually read any data off it.
Unfortunately I have no manuals for the unit, no system disks, no idea of the
cabling, a possibly-dead hard drive, and a definitely-dead power supply. I'm
also missing a tape drive for it (previous owner wanted to keep that) but
hopefully it'll run without it. Never found anyone else who has heard of one of
these, let alone owns one. On the plus side, the case is a nice shade of beige
;-)
cheers
Jules
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Received on Mon Oct 28 2002 - 10:46:00 GMT