Have a problem with one of our Strand 300 desks. I went in midday Tuesday to tiffle with a few bits of this week's show that I'd lit the day before (first night that night) and the desk crashed BIG time - After swapping bits over and re-patching the whole rig, I relit the show blind with our second desk unit, in double-time so at least they had LX for the week's run.

Which left the faulty desk to sort out.

I managed, more by luck than judgment in a way, to get it booting up OK.

However, whilst before this week I'd noticed the occasional blip with shows not wanting to save to floppy, now the thing is telling me that it won't read the A drive at all. During boot-up it says 'Invalid Drive Type A', and if I try to browse files from the archive screen, it just says invalid drive.

I've done all the usual things - 220clean, checked the BIOS (shows the A drive OK there), deleted ALL shows and various odds and sods of general cr*p from DOS. I've also tried a different floppy drive from an unused PC but get the same error report.

There's also a data config error reported in the boot up but that MAY be down to the drive not being recognised...

I'm already swapping e-mails with a couple of ex-Strand support guys from Northern Stage, but so far nothing new is coming up for me to try... My gut instinct is that there's some sort of hardware problem, but not sure how to go about proving it - other than swapping out the drive as I've already done...

So - anyone with any real-world experience of the 300/500 series have any pearls of wisdom for me to try?

I'd like to re-install the software, as there may still be some corrupted files after the crash (or that caused it to do so) but without a floppy drive, that's out of the question!

Please - no wild guesses unless you're in the know with the Strand desks.

EDIT - to make more sense in places!

Has the drive cable or motherboard got 1 or 2 connectors ,if 2 try swapping to the second , then substitute A: for B:, there maybe a bios option to switch them around.

I had the same floppy issues last summer on our 300, so decided to change out the floppy drive it took 5 diffrent drives untill I found one that worked with given that all the drives tested out on a pc fine. One thing I keep meening to try is a compact flash to IDE converter conected to the IDE port in the desk to give some other way of getting files in to it .

Nope - just the one connector.
Tried telling the BIOS that the drive was a 'B' instead of an 'A' but no joy.

A concurrent post has been automatically merged from this point on.


Hmmm... ™
Will have a go with any other spares I can find then.
Mind you, the original drive - which before I removed it did NOT give that error - is now doing exactly the same.....

I presume the BIOS hasn't become corrupt and defaulted A: as 720k or something stupid If its halting on boot due to the error theres a setting in the BIOS to disable "halt boot on errors" or something similar .

Not in that way, no.
It was, and still is, showing a 1.44MB drive for 'A'.

That one I'm not sure of - will have a look when I'm next in front of the beast.

Ah yes. I've chatted with NS about this problem.

Now I have more details.

To check the integrity of the drive and connections, try creating a dos boot disk (either download from web or on a 500/300 system.

Go into BIOS on power up (can't remember of the top of my head but it may be CTRL and S) and tell it to boot first from drive A.

Stick in the floopy, boot the brain and see what happens.

Interested to know the outcome.

K

This is probably an obvious one that you've already done, but make sure all ribbon cables, power connectors, ect are firmly seated. Maybe even pull out and put back (one at a time) in case there's some minor corrosion on the pins.

Update:

Not holding my breath (as I'm becoming convinced this is at the moment a hardware issue) I grabbed a boot disk - result - no change. As expected, because if the system can't see, or doesn't recognise the drive itself, I wouldn't expect it to try to boot from it.

To get to the BIOS is F2 during boot, by the way.

Thanks for trying. At this point I would agree it is more a hardware issue.

During boot, does the LED on the drive come on at all? Can you "SAFELY" measure any volts on the power pins on the drive?

K

The LED comes on and stays on.
This again suggests something hardware, to be honest.
And if it is (as has been suggested elsewhere) the interface at fault, then I suspect that (as I believe this to be part of the motherboard) will be a rather fatal issue for the desk....
Can't see too many motherboards being available these days - and considering that's 90% of what's in the box anyway...

A constant LED on the drive is usually a result of the ribbon connector being the wrong way round, but I presume you have checked this. Otherwise is does sound like an interface fault, which is obviously not good news.

The ribbon cable plug is notched, so unless it can still be inserted upside down, that's not an option, though as you're not the first to make that observation I will double check that - just in case...

The volts on the drive may be high enough to power the LED but is it high enough to power the electronics. Hence the need to measure the volts on the drive if possible.

K

Will take a look later on, if I have chance.

My Strand 300 would not allow me to write anything to floppy, turned out that the solid state disc had become so full that there wasn't enough memory to allow me save a modified show to A:.

By deleting all the unnecessary DOS based files on the C:\ , (I think scan-disk, check disk or something had created a couple of huge log files), which then deprived the operating system of sufficient space to function.

A good clear out of unnecessary obsolete files got the system functioning again.

A bit left brained I know, but may be of help

Regards

John Mac.

Nope - as I said in the OP...

Update...

Well, have installed, yesterday, a brand new floppy drive and lo-and-behold the beast is now talking to it! I note that THIS drive does in fact have the capacity to have the ribbon cable inserted either way up, whilst every one of the 4 2nd-hand drives I tried do not.

However, I can now read from and write to the A drive, both from within GeniusPro and DOS, so all would appear to be good.

I do still get an error during the boot sequence, ie:
That appears just after the statement and before it actually starts DOS. However, that doesn't appear to affect any of the desk's functionality as far as I can see at this point. I've passed the latest update on to my ex-Strand contact and await a response, but pondering whether to do a s/w re-install to combat that error...