[rescue] Apple II boot and other disks

[Michael A. Turner]

> > 	I had an apple ][c at one time so I can offer some 
> pointer. First
> > off the ][c did not need any boot disk. It would boot and 
> run without 
> > having
> > anything to boot from, you just could not do much at all. 
> Load from a 
> > disk
> > and a minimal usage of basic is all you could do.
> 
> Most apps and games boot directly without anything else in the mix.

	Very true and I should have mentioned that.

<snip>
> 
> Or he could get an external floppy, there are some still floating 
> around, and boot from that.  If he's extremely lucky he might find an 
> external 720K 3.5" that works.  I know they existed for those 
> machines 
> because I used them in high school.

	Very true on the 3.5. I wanted one sooooo bad. Unfortunately I have
never seen the drive fail, it was always the controller I saw fail. I had an
external drive for my ][c and it did the same thing as the internal at the
same time. I tried swapping drive between the two with no luck. I Also got
drives from other people and had the same problem. From talking to other
people there's was the controller also. Would read ok but once it wrote it
killed the disk, even if write protected if I remember correctly. 
	Oddly I must have been lucky because I never had a disk drive fail.
It was only the controller that failed on it. Every other system I touched
seemed to be doing the same thing (could read but no write) which seemed
more of a controller problem. I don't know if those drives had separate
write heads in them but I seem to recall that they did not. So if the drive
can read correctly then the head is tracking. Something had to make it go to
track 00 and write over it. I always figured that Apple ][c got poorly
designed chip, or a manufacturing flaw, and that was what cause this
problem.


> 
> > The one thing a ][c in this
> > conditions is good for though is fixing brain fried ][+ and ][e 
> > systems. you
> > can swap the main chips over with nothing more than a pocket knife.
> 
> Or, he could avoid shipping a whole machine and order a 6502c(?) from 
> Digi-Key or Mouser for a few dollars.
> 
> Mike Hebel
> 


Michael A. Turner
Systems Engineer WHRO
michael.turner at whro.org
http://www.whro.org