Usagi Electric | Minicomputer Part 19: Troubleshooting the CDC 8” Floppy Drives (it did NOT go well) @UsagiElectric | Uploaded September 2022 | Updated October 2024, 1 day ago.
In the previous episode we got the floppy drives nice and clean, but we didn’t check them electrically beyond just checking that the AC motors worked. In this episode, we want to make sure the floppies are working in tip top shape before we get too deep into FFC troubleshooting. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned and it’s been a whirlwind of work trying to get these old floppies up. Ultimately, we’re left with a mysterious fault that I still don’t know the answer to!

Centurion Wiki:
github.com/Nakazoto/CenturionComputer/wiki

Floppy Manual:
bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/discs/floppy/77834769Y_Flexible_Disk_Drive_Description_May79.pdf

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Intro Music adapted from:
Artist: The Runaway Five
Title: The Shinra Shuffle
ocremix.org/remix/OCR01847

Thanks for watching!

Chapters
0:00 Introduction
1:41 Plugging it into the FFC
5:05 Testing with the FFC
6:28 Figuring out the pinout
10:00 Testing without the FFC
13:23 And it starts to go down hill
14:54 Testing the stepper and Drive B
18:14 And it all went wrong
19:09 Power reduction option
23:03 St-st-st-stutter
24:49 So what’s wrong?
28:22 Possible fixes?
30:11 Almost there
31:40 Wild bunny!