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Tandy 1000TL drive a critical error on startup

Dokken

Experienced Member
Joined
Feb 27, 2018
Messages
248
Location
TN
I've had a 1000TL for a couple of years but just recently found a suitable ISA VGA card at goodwill. the video card seems to work fine and i see the boot process.

no hard drive in the 1000TL, only a 3.5" floppy. and no floppy in the drive.

it immediately gives me a drive A critical error, press R to retry or C to cancel. i get stuck in a loop here.

shouldn't the 1000TL do something beyond this point with no floppy, no hard drive? any suggestions on what to check? looks like power is supplied to the floppy via the ribbon cable, as there's no other connections to it.


thank you.
 
On regular computers, an error that asks for a disk is normal, but on the Tandy TL and SL series, they have DOS in ROM and should normally boot off ROM. I can think of three things that might be happening: Either the ROM is somehow bad, the ROM is disabled, or the cmos config that specifies the boot device is bad.

I would boot a known good floppy and, if the system doesn't have a hard drive, try to set the ROM as the boot device. You can get the setup program for your model at ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/tvdog/tandy1000/setups/ .

If you remove the VGA card, does it boot normally?
 
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