richarjo
Experienced Member
I bought a non-booting Olivetti M300-02E recently. It has an issue with the drives, both floppy and hdd. The floppy is an Epson SMD-1000. The HDD is a WD Caviar 2120 125mb unit. On bootstrapping, after first diagnostics the HDD gives a disk error. I don't know if it is a hard error or not formatted. The hdd seeks during introductory diagnostics ok. The diagnostics is in rom. The Bios battery has been replaced and the usual SMD "leaky" caps on the motherboard are absent, instead they are barrel type. There's no evidence of re-capping so I'm assuming a factory oddity.
I sourced an Olivetti M300-02 User Disk from Olivera to run startup without a HDD and ran it to A/ prompt without hassle but I didn't at that stage have MS-DOS disks to run Dos other than the basic User Disk functions. The Olivetti User Disk doesn't have fdisk or format to test the HDD.
I tried MS-DOS disks later which I had and they stopped the FDD from reading because they were in rough condition. The floppy drive wouldn't read after that. I have replaced the floppy drive with another Epson SMD-1000 known to be working and the same error of "Not a System Disk" with my special M300-02 User Disk, and several copies of it in-case of disk error.
I haven't reached a point to see the HDD fault or if I can format it or it needs replacing. The only thing I can think of is the floppy cable or the drive controller IC (87C310). I do not have that kind of knowledge though. It seems the dirty floppies I tried has Vexed the system somehow.
I sourced an Olivetti M300-02 User Disk from Olivera to run startup without a HDD and ran it to A/ prompt without hassle but I didn't at that stage have MS-DOS disks to run Dos other than the basic User Disk functions. The Olivetti User Disk doesn't have fdisk or format to test the HDD.
I tried MS-DOS disks later which I had and they stopped the FDD from reading because they were in rough condition. The floppy drive wouldn't read after that. I have replaced the floppy drive with another Epson SMD-1000 known to be working and the same error of "Not a System Disk" with my special M300-02 User Disk, and several copies of it in-case of disk error.
I haven't reached a point to see the HDD fault or if I can format it or it needs replacing. The only thing I can think of is the floppy cable or the drive controller IC (87C310). I do not have that kind of knowledge though. It seems the dirty floppies I tried has Vexed the system somehow.
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