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Trying to boot an Osborne 1

2020-12-05: Trying an Osborne 1 with a fresh boot disk.

I bought a lot of 5 floppies on EBay. They arrived from the Netherlands. Four are supposed to be Double Density, and one Single Density.

We don't know for sure if this is a single- or double-density computer. Recently it did boot, and it did work, including the little built-in display, but we thought the boot disk was damaged, so we got another one.

Also the built-in display seems to have stopped working, but the Composite Video output is good. You can see where I checked it on my oscilloscope before plugging it into the Composite Video input on my big TV.

However it doesn't want to boot from any of the five disks, neither the single- nor the double-density.

If I insert no disk, I get "BOOT ERROR". If I do insert a disk, I get "DISK IS NOT A VALID SYSTEM DISK".

If you've got another disk I could try, write me in the domain "yak.net" as user "strick", or contact me W6REK over N6NFI/R.

Hints:

  • https://www.richardloxley.com/2018/04/17/osborne-restoration-part-11-floppy-controller-debugging/
  • http://www.retroarchive.org/maslin/disks/osborne/index.html
  • https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6187/availability-of-5-25-floppy-emulators

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