There is lots of info on PS/2 systems here:- http://ps-2.kev009.com/ scroll down to the PS/2 section. The floppy connection is odd and are a pain. The drives seem to suffer head wear, I was told because there is no flap on the drive and muck gets sucked in over the heads. You need a reference disk to get it to boot. I think there should be enough info on the site to create one. Dave
-----Original Message----- From: vcf-midatlantic [mailto:vcf-midatlantic- bounces@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org] On Behalf Of Stephen A Edwards via vcf-midatlantic Sent: 07 August 2016 03:40 To: vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org Cc: Stephen A Edwards <sedwards@cs.columbia.edu> Subject: [vcf-midatlantic] IBM PS/2 Floppy Blues
Found an IBM PS/2 Model 60 (huge tower) a while ago. It powers on, displays video, complains about the CMOS memory, and refuses to boot further.
I spent a day fighting with the 3.5" 1.44MB floppy: I recapped it, cleaned the heads, cleaned the track 0 sensor, and it's now happier than it used to be, but it still won't boot disks (it seeks to track 0 on reset, and spins the disk for a bit when it's trying to read track 0 for boot, but then gives up shortly after that). It's a strange floppy: a 40-pin edge card connector instead of the usual 34-pin.
It has a 5.25 MFM (?) drive in it (90X8643 MCA controller card) that spins up and seems to move heads around, but it doesn't seem to want to boot off of that either, perhaps because the CMOS information is gone. Anybody familiar with how that needs to work.
So I'm looking for advice, or reason to get rid of it. Anybody have a spare 3.5" floppy drive FOR AN IBM PS/2 kicking around (i.e., 40-pin edge card connector)? Is there any way to fix up the CMOS memory without booting a floppy? (It doesn't seem to have BASIC) Anybody have a MCA SCSI controller? Or does anybody want to take this boat anchor off my hands?
-Stephen