Toshiba T1850

Hi,

I’ve recently purchase a Toshiba T1850 fully working except for glitchy screen and floppy drive issue.

I fixed the screen by recapping the old capacitors with smd capacitors and it works like a charm now (attached photos), but my main issue is the floppy drive which is a EME-278T. I’ve just replaced the drive belt which is now making the floppy spin, but the drive is reporting ‘drive not ready’. I’ve cleaned the heads with ipa. But noticed after booting the laptop up that the Crystal for the floppy drive which is a 24Mhz is only showing as 4mhz. Not sure if this is correct or not, if someone could advise I would be grateful.

Cheers

Have you observed the movement of the drive belt to ensure that it is working correctly? Sometimes replacing the belt isn't always the final answer to belt issues.

Paralel said:

Have you observed the movement of the drive belt to ensure that it is working correctly? Sometimes replacing the belt isn't always the final answer to belt issues.

Click to expand...

I’ve flipped the driver over and it’s definitely moving the central disc, I also put it back over the right way and could see it was moving. The only part that’s not moving is the head, but I have seen the head move a few times when the laptop boots up

roydz said:

But noticed after booting the laptop up that the Crystal for the floppy drive which is a 24Mhz is only showing as 4mhz. Not sure if this is correct or not, if someone could advise I would be grateful.

Click to expand...

If the crystal is good, such a measurement could result from:
- Using a measuring device that cannot measure as high as 24 MHz.
- Using a measuring device that can measure as high as 24 MHz, but the sampling frequency chosen is too low for 24 MHz.
- Attaching leads directly to the crystal has affected operation of the circuitry. (Measure the signal further along the circuit.)

I've now got myself a SD to IDE adapter & after flashing a modded firmware to the adapter the laptop now detects it as a 120MB hard drive perfectly, but I need to install MS DOS & WIndows onto the SD card but without a floppy drive I cant do this.

I was wondering if there was a floppy emulator that I could hook up to the laptop or even set the SD card up on a virtual machine to be able to boot it, but I have tried VirtualBox & VMware to try and setup the SD card with just the basic MSDOS to see if it would boot. On one image that I downloaded it came back with 'missing operating system' & the virtual machine version came back with 'Use Toshiba Basic'.

I did have a thought of cloning the old hard drive but Windows refuses to mount the drive on the docks I have tried.

Any help would be grateful.