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Having trouble booting with a PS/2 8560

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First post, by druka-grey

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Hi everyone! I hope you're doing well. I would need some help with a PS/2 machine.

I went to a garage sale some time ago and from what I picked up is this IBM PS/2 Type 8560. The machine comes with a hard drive, an external 360k floppy disk drive (the one with the asterisk mark) and these two 5.25" floppy disks:

The attachment 20230802_160021r.jpg is no longer available

Powering on the machine gives me 601 (general diskette or adapter failure), 161 (CMOS configuration lost) and 163 (clock is not updating) errors. I figured out that the caps of the internal floppy disk drive may be bad, so I replaced them and got rid of the 601 error.

Then I replaced the CMOS battery, but I still get the 161 and 163 errors. I guess I have to boot from some utility disk to fix this, but the issue is that I can't get the machine to boot from the internal floppy disk, the external one, nor the hard drive. I'm always ending up with the floppy icon on screen, and pressing F1 get me to BASIC.

I tried Texelec's floppy disk drive adapter with several of my spare floppy disk drives, but then I get the 601 error again.

Being with the original internal drive, the spare one with the adapter or the external one, the drive is spinning slowly and the front LED stays still green.

Maybe some of you know what's going on ? Anyways, thanks for reading!

Reply 1 of 3, by eisapc

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Did you run the reference disk?
Different from ordinary PCs BIOS Setup IBM PS/2 use a setup disk called reference disk to configure the system and set the CMOS parameters.
You might need an additional adf-file (adapter description file) for the floppy adapter, if its not a single loop through for the internal floppy cable.

Reply 2 of 3, by Horun

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Originally the model 60 came with internal 3.5" 1.44Mb floppy, if it does not have one you need to connect one and use the 1.44Mb reference disk. https://www.ardent-tool.com/disks/
http://ps-2.kev009.com/pcpartnerinfo/ctstips/dcb6.htm, https://www.emusee.org/ibm60.html

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 3 of 3, by druka-grey

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Hi. My machine effectively comes with a 1.44Mb internal disk drive, that was malfunctioning and gave me 601 errors, that I fixed by recaping the drive.

So I made a reference disk using an image found here (https://www.ardent-tool.com/disks/) for my model 60 , I can successfully boot from it on my other machines, but I still ending up on BASIC on my PS/2 when using the original internal drive. I think it's malfunctioning but I don't know how to fix it atm.

From the official store (https://texelec.com/product/ibm-ps2-to-standa … floppy-adapter/), the adapter is supposed to just works as a replacement with a standard floppy drive, but I just found out:

The attachment 20230803_163942.jpg is no longer available

On the left is a standard floppy ribbon cable, and on the right is the cable from the adapter. They're inverted. Forcing the adapter's cable the other way works: No more 601 error, seeking sound, but still unable to boot from the floppy with the reference disk inserted or any other bootable floppy.

Thanks !

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