Anyone here have significant hardware experience in the Heathkit H-89 and
Zenith Z-110 equipment?

In casting about to get at some things that are on the Zenith 5-1/4"
729K format floppies, it looked like the easiest thing might be to go back
to the Z-110 to do that.  Well, I have two of them.  But not fully working.
 I pulled all but the floppy S-100 buss cards from them and properly set
the jumpers on the internal video cards for monochrome.  I have a Sony
GVM-1310 monitor for which I can make a cable for RGB video, but at the
moment I've also got an orange Zenith little monochrome monitor.

Neither box will display the familiar hand or boot prep logo.  One box and
card will display a non-populated video raster that can be horizontally and
vertically synced.  It also displays the red ready light display on both
floppy drives attached to it.  Both boxes have audible key click action
from the keyboard.  CTRL - RESET will clear the 16 original stroke keyboard
buffer and reset the click sounds.  Thus without detailed poking at power
supply values and so on it would seem that core action CPU and boot logic
is present on the mother boards.  I've wedge moved all the chips in the
sockets to clean them at this point as well.

Before I go picking in detail at this, anyone have any experience in what
usually fails in these cases?  Electrolytics on the cards?  Or would you
advise I make a color cable next?

Or .. is it maybe even faster to take the drives and put them in an MS-DOS
temp box to try that?   The issue so far is that no matter what MS-DOS box
I try these 729K diskettes in, I can't read them.  It looks like the drive
geometry for the double side 96 TPI and 48 track records isn't seen by any
but the ZDS op system workup, which takes the Z-110 8085/8086 dual
processor unit to run.  If I chunk them in 'current' 5-1/4 inch 1024K
disks, I can see the action to look at them.  I can see the systems realize
something is on them.  But there is no data.

I've tried the various suggestions offered for tools, but not UNIFORM as
yet, of which I do have a copy.  Even ANADISK can't get at this, though it
gets further than the other stuff so far.  This double side recording deal
for the typical 360K single side DD diskettes was a ZDS trick, per my
recall, but that is a LONG time ago.


Thoughts?


Thanks!


--> Sleep well; OS/2's still awake! ;)

Mike {at} 1:117/3001


--- Maximus/2 3.01