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Sharp PC7100

E

eight088

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 31, 2018
Messages
158
Location
Perth, WA Australia
Hi!

I recently acquired this beauty and trying to get it running. I have a boot disk which I've tried in another machine which works (well it will boot up but halt when it knows it's not a sharp pc) and also have a known working dos 6.22 disk. Some people suggest the machine isn't capable of running 6.22 so I'll focus on trying to get it to work with the sharp boot disk which has dos 2.11

I think it might just be the heads on the fdd are dirty and might need a clean, so tried pulling the machine apart but couldn't quite get it fully apart. Felt like I was missing something when pulling it apart as the RH side (looking from the rear) wouldn't slide out and felt like I was going to break something if I kept forcing it.

One thing I did notice with it though when I had the back cover off was that on the back of the board there's a socket for a fdd but no cable plugged in it. Is it possible the drive has been unplugged and cable removed for some reason?

Other than that the machine powers on, the hdd spins up (which doesnt seem to work atm but will work on that once I get it booted on the fdd) and the display looks fantastic. So if anyone knows if the fdd is meant to be plugged into the rear of the machine or if it plugs into another port (I realise this is probably a silly question but I'm wondering this because I cant see if there's another cable going elsewhere from the fdd) or if someone knows how to pull the guts out of the case I'd be very appreciative.

Cheers!
 

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Alright so managed to pull it apart (theres a screw behind the screen and to get to it you need to tilt the screen then just lift it up) and disassembled the FDD. For what ever reason there was no data cable connected to it so thought that was a bit strange but anyway I gave it a good clean and lube and then plugged it into another machine that I have here. It managed to boot from a dos 6.22 boot disk I have that was created on another drive so I now know the drive is good and the alignment is also good.

Reassembled the fdd back into my sharp pc and used a normal pc fdd data cable and turned it on. Still getting an error when I try to boot saying disk error (not a non system disk error). So two possibilities - the controller is knackered which I will have no idea how to fix, or the cable is a sharp specific cable using different pin outs. So just wondering if someone has a manual/schematic for this computer so I can check the pin outs and rule out a bad cable?

tl;dr Does anyone have a manual/schematic for a sharp pc 7100?

Cheers
 
ok i have bit of an update to people who might stumble across this post..

I pulled the computer apart again so I could check the voltages on the power supply. +12v and +5v seemed pretty good with no variations. I didn't test the voltages when there was a load on the ps, so I'll try that now. When I had it apart though I realised that the HDD in there is a Microfile ISA hdd. So I thought while I'm not having any luck with the fdd I'll try the hdd in another XT I have lying around. First attempt and didn't work (which I was kind of expecting) but then when I pulled it out I noticed a jumper on the board with XT/PC option. It was on XT so I thought I'd try PC and what do you know.. It booted up! Nice surprise to see it still had some programs. I did encouter a couple of seek errors but overall it seemed pretty good. So with this new hope, I reassembled the Sharp PC only to still have a problem where it will not boot up. I'm not really too sure how to troubleshoot from here so if anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them and try them out.

Cheers

ps I found a service manual but didn't have any luck finding out what the pinouts are on the motherboard for the fdd. So if someone has one of these computers and wants to let me know about the cable I'd greatly appreciate it!

tl;dr FDD and HDD work in other computers but not the Sharp PC... What should I look for now?
 
hey I'm pretty late to this thread - I have the same machine but mine's missing the CGA card and hard card/ISA slot due to previous owner removing them. I was actually searching to see if anyone had this machine for parts lol

with your floppy drive there's a set of jumpers, I note that cable you've got in there is not original and these drives are dependent on twist/etc

you can also try replacing it with a gotek/flashfloppy which is what I am running in mine - you can use up to 2.5mb images which is useful
 
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