Another Strange 1050 Fault
I’ve got four 1050s (2 x Atarimax Happy, 1 x US Doubler clone and 1 x original Happy. This last drive is now giving me problems. It reads and writes perfectly but often has problems formatting (known good) disks in SD, ED and DD. At the moment ED formats seems to work more often than SD or DD ones but formatting in all densities does occasionally work.
It’s not the drive mechanism as I’ve swapped it into one of the other drives and it works perfectly. It’s not the Happy as I’ve tried that in
Update: Great news! Drive is formatting again in all densities and is fully functional. Tonight I established that the write issues after replacing U17, U21 and CR10 were due to a bad replacement CR10 diode. Doh! So I soldered the original back in and found that formatting worked. The culprit was therefore U21 (3086). To test the drive I have: copied unprotected SD, ED and DD disks with format before write using the Happy Sector Copier; ran the Happy diagnostics; successfully booted from a range
