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IBM P75 luggable questions

R

RadRacer203

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So I picked up a pair of IBM P75 luggables a few days ago (486, 8mb ram, scsi, etc) and I'm trying to get at least one of them fixed up, the second seems to have issues with the video card and more so not sure if that will get working.

My first question is about the floppy drives, both drives I have are dead and I'm trying to see which ones will work. I've seen there is another part number (64f0162) that will work in place of the original (38f5936) on the p70 but maybe there are others? The p75 I know has a different motherboard than the p70 because of the scsi instead of esdi. Maybe another floppy drive can be adapted?

I was also wondering if a scsi2sd might work in place of the original drive. I'm going to see if the original works but I doubt it.

Last thing, is it possible to upgrade the cpu if I solder a socket into the processor card? I have a Kingston Turbochip I was hoping to use.
 
>both drives I have are dead

In what way are they dead? I don't want to be presumptuous as to your current situation, but my experience is that most drives can be brought back to life with some simple cleaning and recapping. Trivial if you think you're skilled enough to solder on a new CPU socket.

>Maybe another floppy drive can be adapted?

Not according to this blog. They seem to make it clear though that you can simply swap it for another P70 or P75 FDD just fine. They also mention that they completely recapped a drive and got it working, which should be good news for you. Obviously your mileage may vary and it's not a guarantee, but definitely something to try before you go spending money on another drive that may not work either.

>I was also wondering if a scsi2sd might work in place of the original drive.

For the P75, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't. SCSI is just SCSI, and unlike IDE, it's intelligent enough that you don't need to worry about drive geometry. For the P70, I'm not aware of any ESDI=>Modern SSD adaptors out there, so you'd likely need to add in an MCA SCSI or IDE controller card to get a modern drive in there.
 
I definitely wouldn't be doing the soldering myself, my hands are too shaky for those tiny surface mount capacitors. I was thinking of getting them done too, but if there is a 2.88mb drive that works, those drives seem to be infinitely more reliable. The original drives I have I cleaned thoroughly and greased but the one will not spin and the other won't recognize when it returns to the start
 
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