Hi pat,
I too just picked up a model 4. I didn't get any disks but mine says "Disk?" when I power it up. I opened it up and mine is a basic 64k machine with two SS disk drives. The drives in mine are made by Texas (somebody), Texas Peripherals maybe? I checked and they're 40 track SS drives. I believe these are the original disk drives for the M4 but I've been told that they will support 80 track and DS drives. But I don't know if you had to patch the BIOS and/or OS to do that.
Joe
At 10:38 PM 2/25/03 -0500, you wrote:
>I recently picked up a TRS-80 model 4, that seems to have problems with
>its floppy drives.
>
>The machine is a base Model 4 with 64KB of ram (I think - haven't yet
>taken the EMF shield off the mainboard), and no peripherals attached.
>When I powered it up the first time, with or without a disk in the
>(bottom) drive, it displayed "Cass?" on the screen, and then I could press
>enter to that and the "Memory size?" prompt, and get a basic prompt.
>
>I tried swapping the floppy drives, and that time I got a "Diskette?"
>prompt if there was no disk in the drive, and pressing any keys didn't
>cause anything to happen. If I put a disk in the drive, the machine never
>displays anything, and then after 10-20 seconds, the drive light goes out.
>
>I tried connecting only one drive at a time, with the same results. If I
>connected a 1.2MB floppy that I had laying around (a Teac FD-55GFR-149-U),
>it did the same thing as if the drives were swapped. Yes, I realize that
>the drive probaly wasn't going to work, I just wanted to see if it did
>anything.
>
>Also, the disk I used was supposed to be a TRS-DOS (bootable) disk, but
>it's possible that they've gone bad after so many years. Are the disks on
>the Model 4 recorded so that I can read them on a PC (IE 48/96tpi MFM,
>compatible with the NEC D765)? I'd like to know if I can make backup
>images and/or see if the disks work on another machine.
>
>Thanks.
>
>Pat
>--
>Purdue Universtiy ITAP/RCS
>Information Technology at Purdue
>Research Computing and Storage
>http://www-rcd.cc.purdue.edu
Received on Wed Feb 26 2003 - 09:14:00 GMT