+remowilliams Posted August 22, 2006 Share Posted August 22, 2006 I hooked up a IIe I recently aquired, and ran into some problems. Now I'm familiar with the II line operation in general, I've got IIc's and IIgs. This particular IIe has an 80col/64K expansion board in slot1, and a DiskII interface in slot 6. I have two DiskII drives that I believe both work correctly. When I power on the IIe I get the boot beep, initial A][ screen and the system starts booting from drive 1. It then most of the time just seeks the drive head back and forth forever, sometimes it will dump to the monitor. On some disks it will stop and appear to possibly load something and then crash. A few times with a certain disk I even got a Dos 1.1.1 screen after about a second. I know the disks are good, they boot in my other machines. I'm pretty sure the two DiskII drives are good (at least they do the same thing). I also have an SVD interface which also does the same thing as the real DiskIIs - the seek lights just keep pulsing instead of actually hearing a head do the job. Any ideas? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+FujiSkunk Posted August 22, 2006 Share Posted August 22, 2006 When you say slot 1, do you mean the slot in the far left slot (when looking from the front), or in the slot that is separate from the back row of slots? The memory/text expansion card should be in that separate slot (and probably wouldn't fit in one of the back slots anyway). Assuming that's not the problem, can you try a disk drive from one of your other systems with that Apple IIe? Whenever I get behavior like this, it usually is the result of a bad disk and/or bad drive. Cleaning the heads on the drives might help; it has for me before. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted August 22, 2006 Author Share Posted August 22, 2006 When you say slot 1, do you mean the slot in the far left slot (when looking from the front), or in the slot that is separate from the back row of slots? The memory/text expansion card should be in that separate slot (and probably wouldn't fit in one of the back slots anyway). Right, I meant AUX really instead of Slot1 Assuming that's not the problem, can you try a disk drive from one of your other systems with that Apple IIe? Whenever I get behavior like this, it usually is the result of a bad disk and/or bad drive. Cleaning the heads on the drives might help; it has for me before. My first assumption would be bad drive as well, but I don't think both DiskIIs are bad, and I did clean them. And the SVD doing the same thing kind of mostly eliminated the possibility of it being bad drives, so to speak. But I think I'll try to hack one of the IIgs Apple Disk drives to the IIe. I have a 20 pin ribbon cable with connectors, so I should be able to take the case of the Apple Disk drive, remove it's dsub cable and attach it directly to the IIe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+FujiSkunk Posted August 22, 2006 Share Posted August 22, 2006 Bad interface card, maybe? Or bad slot? If you have another IIe, you can try its interface card and see what luck you have, or, you can try moving the card to slot 5, which was also commonly used for disk drives (usually 3.5"s, but I don't see why it wouldn't work with 5.25"s as well). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted August 22, 2006 Author Share Posted August 22, 2006 (edited) Good idea, though even after moving the card from 6 to 5 the results are the same. I don't have any extra II parts Bugger. The Unidisk I hooked up does exactly the same crap. Edited August 22, 2006 by remowilliams Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tempest Posted August 22, 2006 Share Posted August 22, 2006 Sounds like it could be a bad disk interface card. I think I have a spare one if you want to try it. Tempest Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Prodos8 Posted August 23, 2006 Share Posted August 23, 2006 Yeah...Its probably the disk interface card. If you hit ctrl-reset while its booting it should drop you into basic w/o any DOS. If you type PR#3<return> you should get into 80-col mode, this should let you know the CPU/80 col card are working properly.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted August 25, 2006 Author Share Posted August 25, 2006 Well, I got two additional DiskII cards. And lo and behold it does the same f*ing thing. Any other ideas, or is it time to look for another IIe? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Prodos8 Posted August 25, 2006 Share Posted August 25, 2006 You could just hook a cassette recorder to it... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaybird3rd Posted August 25, 2006 Share Posted August 25, 2006 Well, I'm afraid I can't offer much advice (having only recently started collecting Apple ][ stuff again), but if you decide you need another ][e or some replacement parts, let me know. I recently scored several ][e computers (many of them 1987 Platinum Editions), and I can certainly send you one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted August 25, 2006 Author Share Posted August 25, 2006 You could just hook a cassette recorder to it... Believe me, for troubleshooting purposes I would! I was actually looking to see if there was some type of .bin to .wav sort of thing for the AIIs to try just that, but I never found one. Well, I'm going with the next theory I had. Since one or two things loaded a Dos screen or something before they bombed out, maybe its the memory. I think I've got at least 64K of 8K chips from the Atari 8 bits around. I'm going to do some surgery. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted August 25, 2006 Author Share Posted August 25, 2006 Well, I'm afraid I can't offer much advice (having only recently started collecting Apple ][ stuff again), but if you decide you need another ][e or some replacement parts, let me know. I recently scored several ][e computers (many of them 1987 Platinum Editions), and I can certainly send you one. I'll definitely take you up on that offer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted August 26, 2006 Author Share Posted August 26, 2006 Well, I swapped out the RAM and the damn thing finally started to load software. There was at least one bad RAM chip. It still has problems and fails the extended diagnostics though. I'm done with this one, I must have picked up the most diseased IIe I could have possibly found. It's going to be stripped for parts. Time to start over with another one Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
82atari5200 Posted August 26, 2006 Share Posted August 26, 2006 (edited) On board the actual disk II motgher board there is a pot that can be adjusted. That is probably the problem. I picked up a II plus from a thrift store a while back and one drive worked and the other didn't . I just opened them both up and set the pot on the bad one to the position of the good one and they work perfectly. I have several Apple II floppy drives if interested in sale or trade. I also have several Apple IIe motherboard if interested.. Edited August 26, 2006 by 82atari5200 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted August 26, 2006 Author Share Posted August 26, 2006 (edited) On board the actual disk II motgher board there is a pot that can be adjusted. That is probably the problem. I picked up a II plus from a thrift store a while back and one drive worked and the other didn't . Thanks, I've known about the speed adjustment pots in the drives for a while now. And I can say 100% at this point that the problem is not the drives, using the SVD pretty much ruled that possibility out even before I went after the system memory. If you've got fully functional IIe mobo's I think I could go for one of those as well Edited August 26, 2006 by remowilliams Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted September 5, 2006 Author Share Posted September 5, 2006 Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who offered help, and a big thanks to jaybird3rd for some awesome Apple II computer goodness! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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