I hate to do this kind of thing, but bump!

Anyone has some hints on the best way to revive this thing? I'd just like to have DOS running...

Have you considered drive overlay software? I've had excellent results with EZ-Drive 9.03W, as described here: EZ-Drive Dynamic Drive Overlay
It should allow you to boot from any hard drive (and access the full drive) without needing to match the original hard drive parameters. As long as the parameters are set to something in the BIOS, not "not installed" or "auto".

There is an Epson ftp archive on archive.org . It might contain what you need . It is over 200GB in size, however .

https://archive.org/download/2015.02.download … pson-europe.com

Thanks a lot fot those two responses, they will help for sure!

HDD setup is done with either disk type or head/cyl/sect and I have the original parameters so it will be ok, the only thing will be to find a functional set of floppies to play with

I'll try this out before downloading a 200Gb archive 🤣

Will post a picture once revived, next step will be to teplace the CdNi cells in the battery with some more recent cells, and it will be a good retro machine

shrad wrote on 2020-11-19, 09:50:

Thanks a lot fot those two responses, they will help for sure! […]
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Thanks a lot fot those two responses, they will help for sure!

HDD setup is done with either disk type or head/cyl/sect and I have the original parameters so it will be ok, the only thing will be to find a functional set of floppies to play with

I'll try this out before downloading a 200Gb archive 🤣

Will post a picture once revived, next step will be to teplace the CdNi cells in the battery with some more recent cells, and it will be a good retro machine

This may be what you're looking for

from here (there's also an nb3s.zip which may be a BIOS file)

ftp://ftp.epson.it/pub/es/compu/

Holy crap! this is a nice one, thanks!

I had a go at disassembling the beast, not a small task and I didn't even take pictures... some screws at horrible places and the chassis was even held by several port mating screws... a nightmare

Also, the floppy reader bracket holds a spring which retains one of the two screen locks, and I had to replace it by a cobbled spring which doesn't quite do the job 😒

Sometimes the urge takes me to disassemble things, I just rage after myself afterwards 🤣... at least it is almost intact and still works, so as soon as I have floppies at hand I'll try to write a floppy image with the archive you attached

I had the opportunity to test the disk and other bootable floppies like dos 6.22 and the like, but it didn't boot and would only display a message when no HDD was present (no system disk error)

It seems the floppy drive is fried, or the bios is not correctly reading the disk because it boots correctly on a VM, either a floppy image or the raw disk

If somebody has ideas they'll be welcome, replacing the drive with a classical one seems to require an adapter cable for power and I didn't have time today to make an adapter

I bought a USB HDD adapter for being able to mount it on a VM and install the disk manager directly, then try booting the laptop... we'll see