Roland XP 60 , 5 octave keyboard , 1997

In for a power supply fault but while in there, the floppy drive has never worked. Would it be a standard PC drive? or known simple repairable stock fault? It does klunk once, on pwering up , sort of PC fashion

Reply to
N_Cook
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I have an old S-20 that the floppy failed. Not a standard floppy. The belt had turned to goo. After replacing , the diskette would not read. Some tweaking of the head resulted in the disk to be read. Not sure this applies to 60 but may be worth considering.

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Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
Reply to
Meat Plow

I located the ps problem and will lok into the other end tomorrow , FD covered over at the moment

Reply to
N_Cook

Well let me know what you find. The S20 has no ROM based sounds so all was loaded at and during performance via floppy. These floppies are roughly the size of a Minidisc. As the diskette was attempting to be read I adjusted the head height and immediately the disk started to load. I went back and adjusted the other two axis adjustments by sight to make sure the head rode true on the surface.

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Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
Reply to
Meat Plow

Standard PC 3.5 inch FD in the xp 60 . Removing it and poking around and refitting I can save to a PC formatted disk and load back a "song" and read as HEX files on a pc so perhaps stuck stepper spindle or connector problem.

Reply to
N_Cook

If it's standard it could be replaced with a PC drive, that's good.

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Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
Reply to
Meat Plow

In my experience, most (but not all) of these floppys are NOT standard PC drives. Why this is/was the case I have never really understood. (Unless it was for the manufacturers to make more money on spare parts). In your case here, count yourself lucky!

I did once try and investigate whether it was possible to reconfigure standard drives to work in various keyboards/samplers etc, but at the time couldn't find enough data, or the time, to do so.

Gareth.

Reply to
Gareth Magennis

has

of

The

read.

FD

read

(Unless

Do you mean non-3.5 inch or not directly swappable FD from a PC to one of these? I did not try an ex-PC FD in the Roland. Noted the type as in the Roland as Panasonic JU 257A 726P, not researched it, as the green FD front panel LED was not lit before fiddling and did come on after fiddling and with it return to function

Reply to
N_Cook

I mean that for most keyboards and samplers etc, swapping in a new PC

3.5inch floppy drive does not and never has worked.

Gareth.

Reply to
Gareth Magennis

I once installed a PC DVDRW in a stand alone DVD recorder. However I used the control boards from the stand alone recorder on the replacement drive. Both were LiteOn products, the drives were 99% the same.

Knowing this to work one would assume that a standard 34 pin floppy would interchange regardless of the unit. That is unless there is some specialized ROM on a keyboard or synth drive.

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Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
Reply to
Meat Plow

There are legions of Akai, Roland, Korg, Emu and Yamaha owners out there that dearly wish this were true .....

Gareth.

Reply to
Gareth Magennis

I understand that. What I don't understand is why you failed to quote my entire reply.

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Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
Reply to
Meat Plow

Are you hoping one day to take over from Phil Allison?

Reply to
Gareth Magennis

Are you being purposefully evasive?

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Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
Reply to
Meat Plow

Lets just leave it there, eh.

Reply to
Gareth Magennis

Ok but in the future please put some thought into your insults.

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Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
Reply to
Meat Plow

Didn't think you could just leave it there.

Reply to
Gareth Magennis

Ah, a 'last word' obsesso. You're predictable.

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Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
Reply to
Meat Plow

In the early days of floppy interfaces, before PCs style drives became "the standard", there were many annoying little variations that could stop a floppy drive working when swapped about. Much of that persists in non-standard drives used on things like keyboards. Why should they strive for compatibility with PCs when we can avoid it and charge extra for a "special" drive?

It used to be that a floppy drive had multiple jumper sets (0.1") that could be strapped to configure them, often to do with things like the logic around which Drive Select (0,1,2,3) and whether the "motor enable" line would be used. Some host systems didn't assert motor enable, so the drive would be jumpered to run off JUST the drive select.

It was PCs, I think, that introduced the idea of no jumpers, no drive select, just put a twist in the cable, which limited you to 2 "identical" drives. The proper floppy spec allowed for 4, but each drive was jumpered differently, and connected totally in parallel.

This is before you get into weird drives that ran at 300 vs 600rpm and that sort of thing, where to use them with a PC, some components needed to be changed to re-set the rotation speed and frequency response to the data being read back.

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Mike Brown: mjb[-at-]signal11.org.uk  |    http://www.signal11.org.uk
Reply to
Mike

In the XT and early AT days the floppy controller boards could handle two sets of two drives. Some controllers could be set to one of four addresses for a maximum of 16 floppy drives on one computer.

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For the last time:  I am not a mad scientist, I'm just a very ticked off
scientist!!!
Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

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