schoschie

Hmm... not a bad idea... could've thought of this myself Yup, I'm from Germany... I could swap the mech myself... problem is I think I saw one of the cables from the mech assembly is soldered onto the main pcb, so I'd have to unsolder it and solder it into the other drive's board... soldering is a good way to completely wreck a pcb if it gets too hot... I'll take a closer look at it... Thanks!

(...) But even if it's not, as you say, another option is the 32-in-1 Warp+ OS which includes the speedyDOS and most/all other OS's, so I think (I'm just learning about this myself) that in conjunction with SIO2PC and A.P.E, maybe the SA/SA2 software could be used. Or is this SA/SA2 .atr images you are refering to possibly the same thing that I see in the screen-shot of 32-in-1 OS;the software on cartridge? Obviously this isn't an instant or free solution to this possible probblem, even if SchoSchie Has anything to do with SIO2PC/APE/WARP+, etc. (...) 882230[/snapback] 'Gunstar', what i meant was, using the ATR images of SA/SA2 or happy/lazer copy s/w thru am emulator like atari800win or atari++, I dont think it will work win atari800win... it might work with atari++, but there again i don't know as both of my 1050's are dead and i don't have an siopc or ape/prosys cable/adapter..l so i can't say if it will work (this is purely guesswork) 882236[/snapback] Thanks again, you two; if I get your point correctly, you're suggesting to make a copy using one of these upgrades and then use the emulator to read the special disk format that they create. But, like I said, I don't have any of these upgrades and I think I'd be going over the top if I went ahead and got one of them for the sole purpose of copying a couple of disks... well... if all else fails, I might reconsider BTW, the emulator I'm using is Atari800MacX which I think has the same codebase as atari800win; or rather, it's the Mac OS X port of that same basic emulator code. There is currently no other, good Atari 8-bit emulator for the OS X platform that I know of.

(...) when you say the turbo 1050 died, was that the upgrade only, or the whole drive, if it was the whole drive, you still might be able to rescue the upgrade and stick it in your normal 1050 temporarily untill you complete all your copying... but i don't know, i'm not some electronics repair freak like several on this forum 882220[/snapback] Me neither No, the 1050 Turbo upgrade apparently is fine and the drive hasn't died completely either ... it starts up fine, the 1050 Turbo software loads as usual, but the drive doesn't read or write data from disks anymore. I'm not sure what happened. It had been working like a charm for days and then all of a sudden I got nothing but BOOT ERRORs with any disk I tried. I did open up the unit and try to see if it was some mechanical problem that I could fix; I also carefully cleaned the read/write head, but to no avail. I think it would be much easier to try to fix the drive because I doubt it's a complicated problem (albeit none that I could solve); moving the 1050 Turbo module to another drive isn't trivial... I remember my dad installed the upgrade for me (sometime in 1987/88) because he's experienced with electronics hardware, and he was busy for about a day...

Carmel, thanks for the idea, but all I have is a normal 1050 drive with no extras. I have another 1050 with 1050 Turbo module, but it died before I could complete my mission I'm going to sell my Atari stuff, which is why I want to save the data on my disks so I can use them in an emulator... so I guess doing fancy hardware modifications isn't really worthwhile anymore :/ Thanks and greetings to all you Atari 8 bit users out there from Germany

Ah... thanks! I'll go right ahead and try!

I've got a whole bunch of disks that I'd like to backup to the PC via an SIO2PC interface. I've been able to backup most disks perfectly, but some have defective sectors, causing my sector copier to abort the copy. I would really like to save these disks for later, as they contain stuff that I made myself (BASIC programs, pictures, fonts, ...) and there is no other way to rescue this data. I've been using the US Sector Copier II by E. Reuss (1985) which works fine but aborts the copy as soon as there is a read error. Do you know a copy/backup program that will continue copying past a defective sector, or do you have any other ideas how I could still save these disks? Thanks a lot for any help!