mdavis@pro-sol.cts.COM (Morgan Davis) (11/18/87)
Sean Kamath is right on the mark with his statements about the ribbon cable being a problem with some Apple Disk ][ drives. I had two drives that went out on me and took them to a local dealer to have them fixed (I didn't have the time to work on them myself). I figured (incorrectly), "The dealer's tech knows about these things. He can fix 'em in minutes." I didn't hear from the tech for a week. He calls and says one drive is fixed (a bad IC on the analog board -- I could have guessed that one). But he says, "The other drive is totally shot. We swapped out everything but the mechanical parts and it still failed. You probably don't want to pay to have a new stepper motor installed." I didn't, especially when he had the nerve to inform me that to fix one drive, and the charge for labor on two drives, it would cost me $90 dollars! NINETY! You can get a new drive for $75. So I said, quite calmly to him, "Keep the good drive and the dead drive. I'll go buy a new one for $75 and save myself some money." At which point we got into a heated argument. Apparently, he didn't realize that he was talking to someone who actually knew a thing or two about computers. I wonder just how many people have been blindly ripped off this way... Anyway, I haggled with the dealer until I got him down to a $35 repair charge for both drives, then picked them up and brought 'em home. Something didn't seem right about "everything being swapped out but the mechanical parts and it still didn't work" yet the stepper motor was working, albeit getting I/O errors when reading a disk. Hmmm.... The *first* thing I did was exactly what Sean Kamath described: hook up the two drives, test them, then swap only the cables and test again. Viola'. Suddenly my *good* drive was now getting errors. The quick fix: remove the connector from the controller-end of the ribbon cable, snip off about an inch of ribbon, then press the connector back on. Works like a charm now. Ninety dollars. What a bunch of crooks. UUCP: [ ihnp4 cbosgd hplabs!hp-sdd sdcsvax nosc ] !crash!pnet01!pro-sol!mdavis ARPA: crash!pnet01!pro-sol!mdavis@nosc.mil INET: mdavis@pro-sol.cts.com