• Westwind Trantor Hard Disk for Osborne Computer

    From John Crane@21:1/5 to All on Tue May 18 06:52:13 2021
    Can anyone point me to documentation or schematics for this?
    I have one in pristine condition, until last month when a capacitor blew...

    Turns out these use the problematic Astec power supplies identical to
    the ones used in the Osborne 01. There is a 0.1uF 250V polymer cap that
    tends to blow. In fact, I've had 2 Osborne 01 machines that blew while
    in service. I replaced the cap and now they work perfectly.

    The Westwind, on the other hand, will not recognize the hard disk.
    However the built-in ramdisk does work.

    My fear is that when the cap blew, a voltage transient may have taken
    out one or more of the large Shugart VLSI chips on the disk controller
    board. These chips may be difficult to source these days.

    -John

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From John Crane@21:1/5 to All on Tue May 18 06:49:11 2021
    XPost: sci.electronics.repair

    Can anyone point me to documentation or schematics for this?
    I have one in pristine condition, until last month when a capacitor blew...

    Turns out these use the problematic Astec power supplies identical to
    the ones used in the Osborne 01. There is a 0.1uF 250V polymer cap that
    tends to blow. In fact, I've had 2 Osborne 01 machines that blew while
    in service - smoke and all. I replaced the cap and now they work perfectly.

    The Westwind, on the other hand, will not recognize the hard disk.
    However the built-in ramdisk does work.

    My fear is that when the cap blew, a voltage transient may have taken
    out one or more of the large Shugart VLSI chips on the disk controller
    board. These chips may be difficult to source these days.

    -John

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)