xplus93 wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

xplus93 wrote:

Are you getting any mechanical indication of the drive attempting to read the disk? If you get an instant error returned then it's most likely a driver or configuration issue. If you hear it trying to focus lock clean the lens and lube the rails.

It is attempting to read the disk when the laser is about 1cm away from the spindle, but the drive spins up, then down, and the head does move. I tried cleaning the lens, and the rails are a PITA to get to. And what should I use to lubricate the rails?

Depending on the type lithium grease or sewing machine oil, or in rare cases they are meant to be unlubricated and you just need to clean off the dust. That's usually very high end audio transports though. If the old stuff looks thick and paste like then use lithium grease, if not then use a small amount of sewing machine oil. Using a wooden toothpick to apply it helps make sure you dont use too much.

Also when cleaning the lens, generous amounts of high percentage rubbing alcohol work best because you can dissolve the dirt in it and it gets absorbed by the q-tip and the remainder evaporates away from the lens instead of having to wipe it dry and leave smudges.

Welp, I looked at the lens glass, and there's a white spot on there and I can't get it out. Would it be possible to replace the lens from another laptop DVD/CD combo drive? And I also can't remove the HDD as the door is stuck, as well as the eject mechanism.

Bought a weird looking 386/486 VLB board with 486DLC-40 in unknown state a few weeks ago and only yesterday I managed to test it. It sure works fine 😀 I had two 486SXL2-50 cpus waiting for testing at least a few months. I swapped the CPUs and inserted the 486sxl2 in the wrong direction and I looked in horror as the PSU wouldn't give power. I knew immediately what's wrong. 486SXL2 markings are not in the same direction. I just inserted it as the DLC was. After inserting it correctly everything worked good 😉 I'll post some pictures later...

Hopefully I'll test some Cyrix 5x86 cpus tonight...

bjwil1991 wrote:

Welp, I looked at the lens glass, and there's a white spot on there and I can't get it out. Would it be possible to replace the lens from another laptop DVD/CD combo drive? And I also can't remove the HDD as the door is stuck, as well as the eject mechanism.

Wouldn't it be easier to just replace the whole CD-ROM?

appiah4 wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

Welp, I looked at the lens glass, and there's a white spot on there and I can't get it out. Would it be possible to replace the lens from another laptop DVD/CD combo drive? And I also can't remove the HDD as the door is stuck, as well as the eject mechanism.

Wouldn't it be easier to just replace the whole CD-ROM?

It's hard to find one online, and on top of that, it requires a full disassembly of the system to remove the CD drive, and HP doesn't supply the repair manual on their site any longer.

Decided to do some further testing on a Socket 7 motherboard that would not POST. The board is a PC Chips M537 with a Pentium MMX 233 MHz CPU & 128MB RAM (using 72-pin SIMMS).

I unscrewed the motherboard from the case, cleaned off all the dust and set it up outside the case. To my surprise it's now working fine and even the coin cell battery seems to have life in it. Not a particularly great board from what I remember, but I'm just happy to salvage another Socket 7 system.

The case needs some love and attention however. The front of the case is a lost cause, yellow, buttons missing, power button missing etc. Luckily, I have another spare AT case also in need of repair (bare metal rusted at back, should be ok to fix), with similar internal fittings & motherboard tray etc, so I can mix and match the best bits of both and put together a nice working system.

Currently using an S3 Virge 86C325 2MB PCI Graphics Card, though once I get this up and running properly I'll probably switch to a Voodoo 3 2000 16MB if I have 1 to spare (or failing that it'll have to be a crap TNT2 M64).

I've got a bunch of spare IDE Hard Drives and I'll probably end up putting in a 20GB drive. Should be ok with a DDO setup.

Never thought I'd be doing another Socket 7 build all these years later, but since I have all the parts anyway and the only thing that's going to cost money is some cleaning materials, I thought why not. 😀

xplus93 wrote:

krivulak wrote:

Hmm... That doesn't make much sence to me. IPA is polar solvent so it can't harm plastics whatsoever. […]
Show full quote

Hmm... That doesn't make much sence to me. IPA is polar solvent so it can't harm plastics whatsoever.

On wiki:
Examples of this application include cleaning electronic devices such as contact pins (like those on ROM cartridges), magnetic tape and disk heads (such as those in audio and video tape recorders and floppy disk drives), the lenses of lasers in optical disc drives (e.g., CD, DVD) and removing thermal paste from heatsinks and IC packages (such as CPUs).

Maybe he used acetone?

I would hope that nobody would be that stupid, but i've done some pretty stupid things myself.

Example of my most recent stupidity. I for some reason though my PII-450 could use new thermal paste.

Gee, Huck, that's some fine whitewashing of that there heatsink! 🤣

bjwil1991 wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

Welp, I looked at the lens glass, and there's a white spot on there and I can't get it out. Would it be possible to replace the lens from another laptop DVD/CD combo drive? And I also can't remove the HDD as the door is stuck, as well as the eject mechanism.

Wouldn't it be easier to just replace the whole CD-ROM?

It's hard to find one online, and on top of that, it requires a full disassembly of the system to remove the CD drive, and HP doesn't supply the repair manual on their site any longer.

Laptop drives generally aren't system specific at all. They are standardized just like desktop drives. All you have to do is find a donor drive and swap the bezel.

gdjacobs wrote:

xplus93 wrote:

krivulak wrote:

Hmm... That doesn't make much sence to me. IPA is polar solvent so it can't harm plastics whatsoever. […]
Show full quote

Hmm... That doesn't make much sence to me. IPA is polar solvent so it can't harm plastics whatsoever.

On wiki:
Examples of this application include cleaning electronic devices such as contact pins (like those on ROM cartridges), magnetic tape and disk heads (such as those in audio and video tape recorders and floppy disk drives), the lenses of lasers in optical disc drives (e.g., CD, DVD) and removing thermal paste from heatsinks and IC packages (such as CPUs).

Maybe he used acetone?

I would hope that nobody would be that stupid, but i've done some pretty stupid things myself.

Example of my most recent stupidity. I for some reason though my PII-450 could use new thermal paste.

Gee, Huck, that's some fine whitewashing of that there heatsink! 🤣

Yeah. PII cartridges were apparently never meant to be opened, and trying to align the heatsink with the screwholes means lot of messy adjustments I may just buy a new CPU. I don't want to take any chance of damaging the motherboard. I may buy a lot with a bunch of more common processors before I try it on another 450. Or wait until somebody makes a guide. The original paste was definitely in need of replacing though. It's something we should all consider if we want to keep these slot 1 processors running for the next few decades.

xplus93 wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

xplus93 wrote:

I would hope that nobody would be that stupid, but i've done some pretty stupid things myself.

Example of my most recent stupidity. I for some reason though my PII-450 could use new thermal paste.

Gee, Huck, that's some fine whitewashing of that there heatsink! 🤣

Yeah. PII cartridges were apparently never meant to be opened, and trying to align the heatsink with the screwholes means lot of messy adjustments I may just buy a new CPU. I don't want to take any chance of damaging the motherboard. I may buy a lot with a bunch of more common processors before I try it on another 450. Or wait until somebody makes a guide. The original paste was definitely in need of replacing though. It's something we should all consider if we want to keep these slot 1 processors running for the next few decades.

Just put it in the sink and scrub it with the dish-brush then dry it in the oven at 75C for a couple of hours, it will look brand new!

If you want to play it really safe you could just let it dry without the oven treatment but then I would wait a couple of weeks before using the CPU as water under the cache chips inside the cartridge dosn't evaporate very fast...

Today I gave a shot to Retr0bright. It was one of the first sunny days here (finally!) and thought I should try it first on turbo and reset buttons before doing anything big. So I cleaned them out, covered with 12% creme peroxide and let them cook on sun while I was doing some tedious work for school.
I didn't take good photo before, so it is not obvious, but the color is certainly way better then it was.

Before:

After:

I mean it is nowhere near perfect, there still is a little hint of yellowing on the right button, but hey, it was the first time in the first sunny day in year...
Now I have to wait for full summer to do the front cover 😁

I've seen some guys do the hydrogen peroxide treatment and it comes out looking a bit streaky. Good luck.

Decided to swap the busted DVD ROM drive with a DVD burner from a parted Presario C700 (no bezel on it) on the Pavilion N3350 (thank God HP and Compaq used the same optical drive interface) and lo and behold.

Replaced some N64 analog sticks with Gamecube ones.

Got many games working in FreeDos 1.2, and the Audician 32 works. I'm investigating stuttering video issues.

Scali wrote:

Our IBM Music Feature Card/Yamaha FB-01 research team has been analyzing and debugging the LSL3 drivers and differences between IMFC and FB-01 at the MIDI SysEx level...
And I think I have found a solution to use a Yamaha FB-01 for emulating an IMFC from DOSBox. I will implement that shortly.

Implemented a first version to translate SysEx commands from IMFC to FB-01: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dlk84chf35jzr2m/DOS … oxIMFC.zip?dl=0
This allows you to play Sierra games with IMFC support if you have an FB-01 connected to your MIDI out.

Tried retrobright on old 8 speed cdrom that was yellow like the smilies 😊 with success. Now it is white like snow. No foto trough..

Just going through a large plastic box full of fans, IDE cables, floppy cables, data cables, serial and parallel IDC cables, heatsinks and so on. Over the years it's all just been dumped into the box and it was a huge mess. So I've spent the last few hours going through it and putting the cables into zip bags to protect them and also separating everything into categories. Might end up placing everything into smaller boxes to make it more manageable and easier to find things...

bjwil1991 wrote:

Decided to swap the busted DVD ROM drive with a DVD burner from a parted Presario C700 (no bezel on it) on the Pavilion N3350 (t […]
Show full quote

Decided to swap the busted DVD ROM drive with a DVD burner from a parted Presario C700 (no bezel on it) on the Pavilion N3350 (thank God HP and Compaq used the same optical drive interface) and lo and behold.

20170510_215557.jpg

20170510_215605.jpg

20170510_215609.jpg

Yeah, it's the same on almost every ide based laptop drive. Don't throw out the old one until you get the bezel off. You should be able to put it on the replacement drive.

Played with this in 86Box

xplus93 wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

Decided to swap the busted DVD ROM drive with a DVD burner from a parted Presario C700 (no bezel on it) on the Pavilion N3350 (t […]
Show full quote

Decided to swap the busted DVD ROM drive with a DVD burner from a parted Presario C700 (no bezel on it) on the Pavilion N3350 (thank God HP and Compaq used the same optical drive interface) and lo and behold.

20170510_215557.jpg

20170510_215605.jpg

20170510_215609.jpg

Yeah, it's the same on almost every ide based laptop drive. Don't throw out the old one until you get the bezel off. You should be able to put it on the replacement drive.

The issue is the eject, indicator, and emergency eject are in different places than the other drive was. I improvised by taping the eject button from the old DVD drive to the optical drive, and it's working fine.

Just testing a P55C chip that can use the TR12 registers. Getting a minimum of 11.70 in Speedsys which is around 486SX-25 territory. I'll see about underclocking it for some additional throttling.