I've got one as well. No idea if it's working, had an mfm or rll harddrive built in with some home made iron brackets, and the fan underneath has a loose rotor.
It's one of those projects that will happen... someday. I hope to add an emulated xt-ide drive to it. one can always fantasize 😀

added to my watch later list.
now sleep !

Thanks very much for taking a look. I don't know if the originals were MFM or RLL hard drives but they were pretty old! I like the ease of blasting away an install from CF image although I feel a bit guilty about the old hardware, so I have tried to make a habit to spin up the original hard drives every now and again - don't know how well I will keep that up! Good luck for your project one day.

weedeewee wrote on 2023-06-12, 20:28:

I've got one as well. No idea if it's working, had an mfm or rll harddrive built in with some home made iron brackets, and the f […]
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I've got one as well. No idea if it's working, had an mfm or rll harddrive built in with some home made iron brackets, and the fan underneath has a loose rotor.
It's one of those projects that will happen... someday. I hope to add an emulated xt-ide drive to it. one can always fantasize 😀

added to my watch later list.
now sleep !

Well, the mainboard has an onboard XT IDE HDD connector if I recall correctly, though I have no idea if the machines were ever sold new with such a drive installed inside.

willinliv wrote on 2023-06-12, 19:29:

Here is a video I have made documenting the upgrade of a 1987 Amstrad PC1640.

Cool video! Thanks for sharing! My father had one of these, too. With an MFM drive in second drive bay, I think.
First he did was to replace the 8086 by a NEC V30.. Afterwards it was usable like a small AT.

He has fond memories of the GEM desktop, too. And Locomotive BASIC v2, which he said was great.
He also remembers DOS Plus as "that DOS that had trouble with Norton Commander".

Hm.. Back then, he also had used a lot of null-modem cable connections.
So perhaps PC-MOS was used on his Schneider PC at some point, too.
And a copy of Windows 2.03, which he had bought in 1987/1988.

Edit: Speaking of hard drives, err, I mean "fixed-disks" (era correct term)..
Before he had been using AT-Bus HDDs, he was a fan of hard cards aka file cards.
These were lightweight WD100x controller/fixed-disk drive combinations for the PC or AT slot.

They had two advantages a) used less power (good for under-powered PC PSUs of the time) and b) were pre-configured for each others.
This made installing/swapping HDDs very easy, because the low-level formatting wasn't necessary.
Merely interleave-factor "needed" a change if the PC was more powerful.