Share your knowledge on these two classic MPCs
By fobedafied Fri Nov 12, 2004 8:53 am
does anyone know how difficult it is to uninstall/install a floppy drive in a 60II? how about an ASQ10 floppy? do these 2 machines have the same floppy drive? ive had problems with my 60II's floppy ever since i upgraded the OS to 3.10... supposedly the replacement floppy that may be in my 60II is incompatible with the newer version of the OS... it makes sense too though since the 60's floppy worked fine before the upgrade and quit working immediately after! anyway, i recently came up on an ASQ10 with OS version 2.03 installed... the floppy on the ASQ works fine, so i am contemplating switching the floppy drives between my ASQ and my 60II...
the logic being that if the ASQ floppy is an original akai drive that it may work in the 60 with the upgraded OS since original akai floppy drives are supposed to be compatible with OS version 3.10... also, the nonworking floppy drive in the 60 was working under OS version 2.12 in the 60 until the OS was upgraded! so, im hoping that if i take the nonworking floppy drive out of the 60 and install it into the ASQ with the earlier version of the OS, that the floppy drive will become functional again... also, i still have my OS version 2.12 EPROMs that came from the 60 when i upgraded to OS version 3.10, so im thinking that i can install the 2.12 version OS into the ASQ as well...

does anyone have any info on floppy installation on either the 60II or the ASQ10??? has anyone ever opened up their ASQ10, if so what is the best way to open it up, especially to get to the floppy drive?

elmacaco,
i saw the pics at the 60 user group site at yahoo. is that your pic of the 60 floppy drive jumper settings? if so, im assuming that those are the jumper settings for OS version 3.10e? have you ever had to install a floppy drive yourself on your 60? would it be the same process and jumper settings on the 60 and the 60II???

any information on this topic would help greatly...

any info on ASQ10s in general would be cool too...

thanks
User avatar

By pieuvre Fri Nov 12, 2004 11:59 am
I think you're right on every point , just switch your floppy drives and upgrade the os on the asq 10 .It's just a little work but i don't see any reason for the trick not to work ( since it's basically the same machine without pads and sample engine ) .

By elmacaco Fri Nov 12, 2004 6:32 pm
That jumper pic isn't mine, but thanks for the credit.

That's a brilliant move. Uninstalling the floppy shouldn't be a problem, just make sure you get the cables back how they were.

the floppy is held in by some screws on the bottom of the 60, I think it is 4 of them.

Swapping them out shouldn't be hard, open them up, ground yourself and do the swap. Do not mess with the jumper settings at all. They should work right out the gate.

If the drive doesn't work in the ASQ it might be that the drive is dirty and a cleaning disk run about 30 times might help, but I hope you tried that already.

My 60 floppy drive has ASQ written on it in pencil followed by something I can't remember, so you should be good to go, keep us posted and if you need help, holla.

By fobedafied Mon Nov 15, 2004 10:18 am
ive been searching online and still cant find much info about either ASQ10 or about floppy drives on the 60II... im kinda reluctant to perform the operation since ive never replaced a floppy in one of these machines before... i guess the best way would be to open them both up at once and take photos of the drives connected before i do anything to them, that way i will have an example of the correct connections in case i forget... i havent even opened both machines up and checked it out yet, ive been inside the 60II before but never the ASQ... im assuming that all the floppy drive connections are plug type connectors that can easily be connected and disconnected carefully without messing anything up??? im just a bit nervous to go at this because i havent found too much info on the subject after a lot of looking around...

By elmacaco Mon Nov 15, 2004 5:24 pm
It's a ribbon cable and a power cable, like on a computer, grab the plastic and and wiggle it out.

You can do it. just un plug them and ground youwself by touching the transformer housing.

By2thouXL Fri Nov 19, 2004 4:57 am
man i been looking for a asq 10 lol and u gonna **** the one u have up lol

wanna sell?

By fobedafied Fri Nov 19, 2004 8:01 am
well,

i tried to take apart the ASQ10, but it started gettin too deep for me to do by myself, the top panel opens up with hinges like the 60 mkI, but the top is connected still with various cables and wires so you cant really open it up all the way... also there are 4 screws that are holding the floppy drive in place, and 2 of these are hidden under a massive circuit board(the one from the top panel which is what the top panel buttons are connected to) making it pretty hard to get to these 2 screws... you have to take off about 10 screws all the way around the circuitboard to get that out of the way and get to the floppy drive screws, in the meantime there are many cables connected to this circuitboard which make it very difficult to do without disconnecting them all, which would be pretty tedious. i dont think i can this without completely disconnecting the circuitboard... damm, they made it hard to get to... i dont think imma go about this operation myself, i got the half of the circuitboards screws off and decided that id better just put it back together before i mess anything up... i got a scare when i got it back together and fired it up, the screen went completely black on me!!!
it took me a second to figure out that i had messed with the contrast knob in the process of opening the machine up! everything works cool now though... i know this guy that customizes and repairs technics 1200s, i might ask him to help me with it... i dont know though, he has a lot of experience with this type of stuff, but not the ASQ10 specifically...
i dont know...

does anyone have any info on the ASQ10 at all? especially of interest would be floppy drive replacement instructions and/or pics... i cant find much of anything about this machine online at all...

By2thouXL Fri Nov 19, 2004 3:16 pm
instead of fukin it up just for a floppy why now buy a new floppy for the mpc60?

i will buy it for 150$ since ur willing to compleatly **** it up why not take my 150 and let it have a good home?

then with the 150 u can buy a new floppy drive for it :D

By fobedafied Fri Nov 19, 2004 9:18 pm
ummm... NO... :roll:

2thouXL wrote:instead of fukin it up just for a floppy why now buy a new floppy for the mpc60?

i will buy it for 150$ since ur willing to compleatly **** it up why not take my 150 and let it have a good home?

then with the 150 u can buy a new floppy drive for it :D

By2thouXL Sat Nov 20, 2004 9:52 pm
it was worth a shot i mean ur gonna realy sacrafice messing it up and destroying it just for the floppy i thought i had no value to u

so i thought i would buy give it a good home and u can buy a new floppy for the mpc 60

anyway good luck and i hope u dont break it

By elmacaco Sat Nov 20, 2004 11:26 pm
what an opportunist.

You can do it fobe, it is just about keeping tabs on everything you remove, the floppy on the 60 isn't hard to remove, the smaller size of the asq is probably why they have it under a mainboard.

it just takes patience.

By djames Wed Dec 01, 2004 11:07 pm
If you are still trying to figure this out try this. The floppy you purchased from Route66 should have a jumper block on the back that looks like this:
Image

Correct?

If so then try reconfiguring your jumper setting like so:
Image

*Note: FG will be vertical instead of hrizontal*
Let me know if this works

By fobedafied Thu Dec 02, 2004 11:16 am
Where are the floppy drive jumpers at????


i just took the thing apart, took the floppy out, and looked around for over an hour... i cannot find the jumpers at all... where are they located? i studied the pic on the yahoo mpc60 user group and cannot figure out where to look inside the machine to find these jumpers... on computer cd drives, the jumpers are on the drive itself, i took the floppy out and opened it up, i saw no jumpers at all... i must be blind... i feel like such a noob.... :?


HELP!!!!

By fobedafied Thu Dec 02, 2004 11:17 am
the above post im talking about opening the 60... i havent got far enough with the ASQ10 to take the floppy out yet...