SomeGuy
Veteran Member
Not quite vintagy vintage so putting in off-topic...
I'm having kind of an odd problem with one of my motherboards right now although I don't have time to dig in to it any more at the moment unless someone has a brilliant idea.
I have a KT7A motherboard and the floppy drives are acting kind of "flakey".
It is not the drives, I have already tried a number of different drives and drive combinations. They all behave the same way. Also already been through a number of cables.
The problem is that when reading or formatting, it will intermittently see "bad" sectors twoard the inner tracks of a disk. Even if the disk and drive is verifed as perfect elsewhere.
When I put a freshly formatted "bad" disk through my Kryoflux all of the "bad" sectors read perfectly and show no signs of distortion or damage, so the problem appears to be only READING.
What was really driving me bonkers was that every time i had the machine apart it would magically start working perfectly.
However the other day I sort of accidently stumbled on a clue. I left the case cracked slightly open and was reformatting a disk in a loop... many errors, many errors, some errors, some errors, no errors, no erros, no erros, no errors....
Its themal related! I could reproduce that by sticking a big box fan up to it and suddenly get no errors.
That makes me suspicious it could be a capacitor somewhere, but none looked damaged. Hopefully it is not something in a chip.
I tried to narrow it down with some compressed air, but with the case open things cooled down too quickly to be sure. The ventelation in this case does suck, but it has run fine all of these years. Unfortunatly, even leving the case open I'll still get very ocasional errors.
I doubt it is the power supply, that is farirly new but I still need to try swaping. I do have some spare KT7As but really don't want to swap and reconifugre motherboards and CPUs right now.
At any rate, it is a rather bizarre problem.
I'm having kind of an odd problem with one of my motherboards right now although I don't have time to dig in to it any more at the moment unless someone has a brilliant idea.
I have a KT7A motherboard and the floppy drives are acting kind of "flakey".
It is not the drives, I have already tried a number of different drives and drive combinations. They all behave the same way. Also already been through a number of cables.
The problem is that when reading or formatting, it will intermittently see "bad" sectors twoard the inner tracks of a disk. Even if the disk and drive is verifed as perfect elsewhere.
When I put a freshly formatted "bad" disk through my Kryoflux all of the "bad" sectors read perfectly and show no signs of distortion or damage, so the problem appears to be only READING.
What was really driving me bonkers was that every time i had the machine apart it would magically start working perfectly.
However the other day I sort of accidently stumbled on a clue. I left the case cracked slightly open and was reformatting a disk in a loop... many errors, many errors, some errors, some errors, no errors, no erros, no erros, no errors....
Its themal related! I could reproduce that by sticking a big box fan up to it and suddenly get no errors.
That makes me suspicious it could be a capacitor somewhere, but none looked damaged. Hopefully it is not something in a chip.
I tried to narrow it down with some compressed air, but with the case open things cooled down too quickly to be sure. The ventelation in this case does suck, but it has run fine all of these years. Unfortunatly, even leving the case open I'll still get very ocasional errors.
I doubt it is the power supply, that is farirly new but I still need to try swaping. I do have some spare KT7As but really don't want to swap and reconifugre motherboards and CPUs right now.
At any rate, it is a rather bizarre problem.