- Greetings, and welcome to an LGR thing

in the middle of the night, or at least it is for me

as I record this, 'cause I couldn't sleep

and uh, I don't know, I had PCjrs on the mind.

Specifically this interesting PCjr

that came from the Computer Reset Warehouse

in Dallas, Texas, I did a video on that a little while back.

And it's an interesting thing

because, well, it not only has

this Legacy branded hard disk add-on in there,

which I think is a 20 meg drive,

connected to the side here, it's just like an open board

with a cable sticking to the side there.

But yeah, what makes this most interesting

is because of where it came from.

This was the address label on the box we found it in.

Yeah, that is Sierra On-Line

when they were in Oakhurst, California

with a Coarsegold mailing address.

Yeah, it was in a box with some interesting paperwork.

There was a work order here filled out by Robert Fischer,

and turns out this thing was used

in the quality assurance department.

Oh yeah, and check out what's on the bottom here, too.

QA Equipment Room, Sierra On-Line Incorporated,

asset number SOL 30602.

Hopefully I won't be S.O.L. when trying to get this working.

This actually said here to uh,

it was dated February 28th, 1990.

"Floppy drive repair or replace,"

"hard disk repair or replace,"

"keyboard port repair or replace, general checkup."

And yeah, it was sent to Computer Reset for repairs,

and who knows if it actually was.

We found it in an area where a lot of things,

like, were repaired, and were just never picked up.

The state of this, I'm not entirely sure,

but what I have done so far,

I wasn't recording voiceover when I did it,

but I did check over everything on the inside of it

and just give it a quick once-over

and see if anything looked weird or out-of-place, or--

No, not really, so I plugged it in and powered on.

The main system unit was perfectly fine.

Everything started running as it should, it sounded like,

and then I went ahead and tried

to power on the Legacy hard disk thing here,

the add-on just separately, and yeah, that powered on too.

Nothing blew up, no magic smoke being let out, so who knows?

But it is at least to the point here

where I've got it all set up,

and I do have it set up with a monitor

that doesn't go with it, this is the IBM 5154

an EGA display, but it'll work.

I actually have an adapter

that I got also at Computer Reset.

It allows me to plug this into any standard TTL display

instead of having to use the PCjr's, like,

weird proprietary connection, so yeah.

I've got it plugged in here with a cable

because who knows if the I/R port's working or not,

but anyway, let's get this thing turned on.

I just wanna see what's on here.

I genuinely have not seen what's on here [laughs]

so let's do that.

All right, so I've got power to the things.

Let's turn them on, I guess one by one, I don't know.

Genuinely don't know how this works exactly.

I've never used a hard disk with a PCjr before.

Typically it boots from the floppy drive down there,

but I'm assuming we won't need to do that with a hard drive.

I don't know, honestly.

Wow, okay, so it's going up to what, 640K now?

It did not with just the regular PCjr.

I'm assuming there's a RAM expansion in the Legacy unit.

Okay, is it doing anything, it's flashing. [chuckles]

Those old drives, man. [computer beeps]

Okay, that's something: hard disk initialization error.

Indeed, I'm not sure if it's spinning or not.

Doesn't really sound like it.

Doing all the flashy lights again,

but it is pretty quiet, so, yeah.

Well, I'm gonna look into this and see what I can find out.

All right, so I got the cover off

of just the hard disk unit here,

and this is kind of what I saw when I first found it.

It was just moving around like this,

and there's actually a piece of metal

that's bent over pretty good there.

That was like a bracket that connects

to hold the drive in place,

so I don't know what it went through.

In fact, it looks like there may have only been

just one screw put back at all.

Yeah, these MFM drives.

So obviously it was booting to the controller itself

because it knew that there was a hard drive to fail,

so that's something.

It's definitely not spinning up at all, hm.

Yeah, the noise you're hearing there

is just the PCjr itself, yeah, now that I look at it,

there's definitely a lot of RAM installed in there.

There's like two boards just populated.

There it is again, 1701 hard disk error.

So looking up the 1701 error,

and it's one of the most generic ones

that a PC XT-class machine could make.

It could be the cables, it could be the jumper,

could be the power, could just be the dead drive.

It just, [laughs ruefully] it's a lot of possible things.

Amusingly, though, it seems that that legacy hard disk unit

is a lot more rare or odd [laughs] than I thought it was.

Here on the Mike's IBM PCjr Page,

which is like the source for PCjr stuff,

in the years he's been collecting and researching,

he's only come across two examples

and he doesn't know anybody else who has one,

and he also mentions that there was a 512 K version planned

but was never delivered.

Mine's definitely adding 512K.

Well, it does say that it has its own built-in stuff

to make sure that it boots without any kind of disk needed,

so that's good, but I mean, that's what I assumed.

It was seeing that there was a hard disk unit there

that was failing, so anyway, let's dive into it

and just, I don't know, poke around

and plug in some other things, who knows what.

[motor chirps] It started making noise.

I was messing with the stepper motor.

[drive motor continues odd noises]

That makes me think it's seized up.

[powers off] [motor buzzing fades]

[powers back on, no drive motor]

And it doesn't do it every time.

So yeah, what I'm doing here,

in case you haven't messed with one of these drives before

is I'm just messing with this.

It's a little wheel on this one.

Sometimes it's just a rod, I mean,

there is still a rod there,

but that is connecting to the stepper motor,

and sometimes they just kind of get seized up, really.

It's moving pretty freely at the moment,

but that's probably 'cause I've been messing with it.

I was actually just putting in just a little bit

of, like, bearing oil.

There's a video by Adrian Black on YouTube

I was referencing for doing this.

I remember seeing it a while back,

so thanks for posting that in the past, sir,

but anyway, I'll keep doing this, see if it does anything.

Out of curiosity here, I know that's not a good sound,

but still, let's just see.

[computer beeps]

[drive motor noise]

[motor chirping noisily]

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Whoa, whoa, whoa!

Okay, I wasn't expecting to get this far yet.

[grunts with glee]

I am surprised I am getting any of this.

That's "Codename: ICEMAN," interesting.

What is any of this?

Okay, I've gotta get some floppy disks.

Oh, I hope I can get the files off of here.

Maybe this is not a working disk.

I'll try another disk!

Okay, well that was something.

[exasperated moan]

Let's just try, well, I don't even know what's on here,

so I am gonna copy over everything I can

while this drive is sort of somehow working.

[sped-up keyboard and disk sounds]

Ah, my heart is still racing. [laughs]

Maybe the drive will keep working,

even though it sounds like death, but oh, this is nuts!

Whole new box of disks.

So this looks just like "Codename: ICEMAN"

but [laughs] nobody wants that,

but I'm gonna copy it anyway.

Yeah, that's just like the whole game.

On the other hand, it does look

like there's some QA stuff in there, QA.BAT.

Okay, so I'm gonna spend a while

just copying all this over. [laughs]

And as soon as I turned the camera off, that happened.

Filter cap, magic smoke. [blows onto PSU]

Okay, well, not the end of the world.

That can hopefully be fixed.

I turned it off pretty quickly there.

Well, either I get that taken out of there and replaced

or maybe switch the drive over to another machine

or something, I don't know, man.

Either way, we are getting somewhere.

I wanna get those QA files off.

Ah, those filter capacitors, man, every time.

What a weirdly put-together, like, dense power supply!

[chuckles]

Well, there's that guy.

Yeah, I can see it's like missing half of the outside of it.

It's all bulged and exploded.

Yeah, it seems like it's a pretty popular power supply

in a variety of different things,

radios and drum machines or something.

And, like, several places mentioning these RIFA caps

constantly exploding on them, so yeah.

I mean, that's not surprising, those things suck.

But anyway, good grief, what time is it?

Oh my goodness, 4:22?

Whelp, I am going to bed, [laughs] gonna try to anyway,

and come back whenever I've got something else to do.

[Burgertime PC speaker music]

Okay, out of curiosity, I did try it in the IBM AT here

and it didn't work.

Now I'm playing BurgerTime, but no, seriously,

I did try it multiple ways,

like it's got this board on the bottom,

and I tried it, of course, without that

and just the normal, the drive connected directly to it.

Set was the right type in the BIOS

with the setup program and everything,

and nope, didn't work, tried several different types.

Tried different cords.

Just didn't wanna recognize it.

Anyway, okay, been about a week,

and I got a package of this [laughs]

which was new at one point.

You can see it says "new" on June 26th, 1990, perhaps,

but anyway, on a quick note here about these things,

you can actually use these power supplies

without that RIFA cap, you know, just yank it out of there

and use it anyway, and I've tried that before.

Sometimes it works, [laughs] sometimes it doesn't,

and if you get like dirty power being sent

to the other components, then that could be an issue

as it was for one of my TRS-80s once,

but I just wanna make sure that I'm not, like,

ruining something else in here

before I get all the files off there.

Just an extra precaution for my own peace of mind.

It's not exactly the same, actually.

I mean, you can see that it's just slightly updated.

It's got like a different grille on top

and maybe that means they put some better capacitors

and stuff in there, who knows?