XP-50 floppy drive repair tip

Forum for JD, JV, XP and XV synthesizers from 1990's
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AncientGeek
Posts: 26
Joined: 17:24, 2 February 2018

XP-50 floppy drive repair tip

Post by AncientGeek »

I'm currently restoring an XP-50, and the floppy drive was not working. I know that it may be desirable to replace it with a floppy emulator, but I thought I'd have a try at repairing the old one and what I found might be useful to others.

The controller board is mostly surface mount with some though-hole components. I noticed that the solder on the data cable pin joints appeared rather crystalline, rather than smooth and shiny as they should be. I applied some flux and reflowed each joint a soldering iron, adding a little 60/40 tin/lead solder in each case.

The floppy drive now works perfectly.

If you want to try this, you'll need a fine tipped iron, and go easy on the extra solder to avoid solder bridges.
Universal Exports
Posts: 5
Joined: 19:54, 14 January 2019

Re: XP-50 floppy drive repair tip

Post by Universal Exports »

I took my XP-50 in for repair last week as it had developed a hideous distorted sound. The engineer was able to cure the fault as some of the caps had leaked over the mainboard and caused corrosion.

However, when I got it back and switched it on, I found that I wasn't able to load anything from its disc drive (which had worked fine before going in for repair) and I got a "drive not ready" message. This message only appears when there isn't a floppy in the drive and there was! It's possible that the repair engineer accidentally affected something to do with the disc drive when repairing my outputs/corrosion issue but I'd like to know if anyone has come across this disc drive issue and what they did to rectify it. Cheers.
AncientGeek
Posts: 26
Joined: 17:24, 2 February 2018

Re: XP-50 floppy drive repair tip

Post by AncientGeek »

I'm away from home right now, so I can't check mine, but if I remember correctly the floppy drive has separate power and data cables. Ensure that the data cable is secure at both ends and correctly oriented. I can't remember if there's any keying on the data cable, but if there isn't, you may want to check that it's inserted the right way round at the disk drive end. Failing this you may want to check the data cable connector pin joints as in my post above.
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