Detecting a dying 1541?
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From: Ian McCall on 13 Jul 2008 12:09 I've fired up the real C64 for the first time in a while, mainly to check what's working and what isn't (I'm normally on emulation, Power64 under OS X). Pretty much all the tapes I have are working, but I can't get a thing to load from the 1541. This has two possible reasons: 1. All the 5 1/4" disks are dead. 2. My 1541 is dead. Thing is, without a second drive around it's going to be hard to tell which is the more likely option. It might seem odd that all my disks died, but it's certainly possible as I found they'd fallen from where I normally store them and then had things stacked on them - the person who did it didn't realise there were things inside the rather flimsy cases... So - any ideas how I can go about telling? Any diagnostic things I can download? I do have an MMC64 card, so I can still get programs over to the C64 to try them out. Cheers, Ian
From: Ian McCall on 13 Jul 2008 14:47 On 2008-07-13 17:09:30 +0100, Ian McCall <ian(a)eruvia.org> said: > I've fired up the real C64 for the first time in a while, mainly to > check what's working and what isn't (I'm normally on emulation, Power64 > under OS X). Pretty much all the tapes I have are working, but I can't > get a thing to load from the 1541. This has two possible reasons: > > 1. All the 5 1/4" disks are dead. > 2. My 1541 is dead. ok - a bit more info now. Starting up normally and doing an: OPEN 15,8,15,"NEW:TEST,ID" ....worked fine. However, booting up the MMC64 and trying to use the (newly installed) D64 Writer plugin to copy over a D64 to a blank floppy just results in fleshing red LEDs immediately on the device. Anything else I can do to test? Cheers, Ian
From: David Murray on 13 Jul 2008 18:56 After formatting that disk, could you save and then load a small BASIC program? Perhaps the drive is simply out of alignment?
From: Ian McCall on 14 Jul 2008 03:15 On 2008-07-13 23:56:30 +0100, David Murray <adric22(a)yahoo.com> said: > After formatting that disk, could you save and then load a small BASIC > program? Perhaps the drive is simply out of alignment? Will give that a shot this evening when I'm near the machine again. Interesting one - I can't get it to recognise my Psi 5 Trading Company or my Defender of the Crown disks, both of which are originals. With Psi 5 it just keeps reading and then eventually corrupts the characters on the standard Commodore start up screen (appears to be random gibberish replacing the existing letters). With Defender of the Crown the screen goes black and the "VMAX!" characters appear dead centre, but no matter how long you wait the drive continues to read. With the D64 writer plugin for MMC64, the drive starts flashing red pretty much as soon as you ask it to write the image. And yet with standard format commands everything behaved itself. Will try the BASIC program later. Does anyone have a link to a BASIC program that will just try blatting data and fill the disk? It's been a while since I've written any C64 code ("a whle" translates to over twenty years...). Cheers, Ian
From: David Murray on 14 Jul 2008 10:32
> Will try the BASIC program later. Does anyone have a link to a BASIC > program that will just try blatting data and fill the disk? It's been a > while since I've written any C64 code ("a whle" translates to over > twenty years...). You could just type anything onto BASIC line numbers and save it. It doesn't matter so much what the program does, rather if it saves and loads correctly. You could just type stuff like: 10 THIS IS A TEST TO SEE IF MY 20 DISK DRIVE IS WORKING CORRECTLY ETC.. I suppose if you wanted to make the program happier, you could put REM statements in front of it. Anyway, if it succeeds to save and then after a power off will load correctly on a disk that the drive recently formatted itslelf, then it is probably out of alignment. |