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16Jan/180

Windows 7 doesn’t boot after installing on Hyper-V

Thanks to my fresh windows 10 install, I had to re-install Hyper-V. No real issues... made a new machine and booted a Win7 ISO. All well... installed quick... reboot just gave me a black screen with a flashing cursor.

Googling came up with this link... Lots of rubbish replies... but there was another one of those gems. Those one-liners that save the world.

Boot your installation media and go to command prompt via recovery, it said. Just type the following, it said:

bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force

And, well, shit... it worked perfectly.

16Jan/180

Amstrad CPC6128 – Repairing the internal floppy drive

The internal drives in these machines need their own separate 12v supply. It's really quite a strange setup... as it means the power supply needs a male (positive on the inside) 5v DC jack and a female (positive on the outside) DC socket to get the machine up and running.

It all makes sense once you realise that the power was supplied by the monitor that came with the set. And since you don't want want the user to be able to get the plugs in the wrong order, having them oppositely-sexed means that there's only one-way-round that they can be connected... unless you try to connect the devices to themselves?

Anyway... I built the required power setup in the prevous post. This time around I actually have a set of strangely-sized Amstrad 3" floppies to test!

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I bit the bullet and just tried to read the disks as soon as I got them... because, hey, sometimes things just work... Of course, no dice; it was either "no disc present" or "failed to read" each time. What next? Time to pull the thing apart! I really should've taken photos when I first did this as the amount of ... insect (I think?) debris inside the machine was intense. There were quite a few of either ant, moth or some other cocooning insect homes installed around the motherboard and, as expected, right inside the floppy chassis too. These things seemed to like to be near the warmer components.

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There was also a very thick and protective layer of dust. The entire machine was pulled apart and 24hours were spent cleaning and drying. Again, I should've taken photos... but I was too scared to move everything on to the workbench. I didn't want a biohazard scene to break out. A lot of soap-suds later and the machine came up much nicer, but still had a pretty mottled outer-case.

Anyway, back to the floppy drive again. The discs weren't reading... so I watched them try to work whilst powered up. The head was happily scanning through the tracks, but the disc wasn't spinning. Turned out to be the age-old totally-trashed-drive-belt trick. Actually, when I first opened the case I should've realised that the 10mm x 5mm shards of black plastic (of which the texture should've been rubber) were chunks of the belt. They were actually so solid that I didn't recognise that they could've ever been elastic or soft!

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Yup, those chunks above are the remnants of the belt. What to do? You could go on eBay and find a legit belt... or you could dig in your stationary draw for something like this.

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And then, well, just undo all the screws on the underside of the drive, disconnect a cable or two and fit a rubber band. Be careful not to damage the band on sharp edges when you install it as you'll just be creating a weak-spot which'll tear when you least expect it.

Put everything back the way you found it and give it a go. I managed to get past the "no disc found" errors... but I still couldn't list a directory structure. I popped the disc back out and wiped down the head (there's a single-sided head in the drive, but the disks are double and need to be flipped) with alcohol wipes. No luck... but something occurred to me; there was a lot of play in the part of plastic that pushed the disc down onto the head... which meant that it wasn't actually properly being pressed down?

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I gently pressed down on the metal plate that the disc actually sits on, just to see if there'd be better contact with the head, of which is under the inserted disc. Damn! It worked! I had no idea how to run LOGO3.COM, but the directory was there, printed in all its glory.

So, not enough downward force once the disc is inserted... how to fix? There happens to be a spring on either side of the 'floating' part of the chassis that the disc is supported on. I assumed that these springs were life-expired and weren't pulling down as hard as they should be. Probably explains why the disc doesn't 'click' in when you insert it either... it goes in and floats around.

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Thanks to Jaycar, I purchased a box of springs. Actually, further thanks to Jaycar... they were free... as I received an AUD$25.00 giftcard in the mail for christmas due to my shopping last year!

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Finding matchingly-sized springs was easy enough and installing them was pretty straight forward... just use tweezers to hook the inner loop.

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From here, the 'click' was intense. Powering it all back up got me the following...

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Snap. Just works(tm). Now... how do I even run Logo?

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Nope... After a little googlin', turns out that it needs to be run from the CPM operating system... which is on the disk? Or something...

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Getting somewhere...

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And then... I have no idea how to use logo...

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But win! I now have both an internal and external drive!

Filed under: Retro No Comments
8Jan/180

The Annual Christmas Pilgrimage – December, 2017

Both directions this time... also some nice new liveries thanks to SCT's new east-coast running. Aurizon's (QR) last intermodal also passed through, but I wasn't going to get up at 0400 to see it. Early on a Thursday, Qube was first off the blocks with a southbound CM service from Harefield.

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I then just managed to catch the Southbound Albury V/Line service just south of Benalla. Last time I tried to do this I received a speeding ticket.

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The new livery is being called "Polly Waffle" or "Turkish Delight". It's really a little-too-bright, but hey... something different. I then caught a southbound steelie at Bomen... but lighting wasn't the best.

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A bit further on, I fluked a meeting with the southbound Qube Harefield shuttle. First time I've seen the 44s actually moving!

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Further into Junee saw a pair of 81s shunting around... the best part was that they were coming off the Coolamon branch to head north!

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And so... I checked in to my hotel and then bolted to Frampton Siding once they started moving. This is an adjusted alignment for northbound freight to get over the grade... hence the veering to the left.

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The usual midday lull coincided with a dip in the pool. Alerts were set so that I knew when something was approaching. This time it was to be a single QBX flogging it up the mainline with a rake of new flats for the Harefield service.

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Pretty random and moving! Couldn't beat it back to Junee. The afternoon was then spent at Jindalee. First up was a pair of CSRs on a southbound intermodal. I'm starting to like them, even though they had a problematic (asbestos! reliability!) debut.

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Of course, an evening in Coota isn't complete without an NR-led heavy freight through the curves. This time from a little higher up the road.

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And finally a trio of 81s with an empty grain.

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A week was then spent in CBR with the family. On the return trip, I chose to spend another night in the country to catch a few special movements. First up was a northbound steel train of which I just managed to get at Cootamundra.

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And next was the fun part. There was a shutdown between Melbourne and Adelaide, so all westbound services from SCT were being redirected via Parkes... talk about the long way around!

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Terrible morning light meant awful photos... but it was cool to see an intermodal using the other leg of the triangle. Later on in the afternoon a grain train was held in the loop to the east of Cootamundra to let the XPT and then a northbound intermodal pass.

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I then caught the grain train itself around the curves at Jindalee.

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Finally, an Ore train came south from Stockinbingal. These always have random locos on them. This time it was two 82s with an 81 sandwiched inbetween. The last 82 had a nice fresh paintscheme as well!

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After that last shot, I travelled a little further up the hill from the usual photo-point on West Jindalee Road. Turns out, further up, you can see a lot more of the trains coming down the curves. This was perfect, as there were two southbound intermodals on their way.

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I then returned to Melbourne the following day, as there was an SSR grain train loading at The Rock. Originally with 4 locos, it'd left two in the station area and I perfectly timed getting there to see the northbound steel.

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The rest of the grain train was busy loading in the silos...

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And that was another successful christmas trip. I tried a few tip-shops on the way back, but the only one open was Wagga Wagga and there wasn't much to be bought. Albury and Wodonga both seem to have huge tip-shops, but they were closed for the holiday season!

Filed under: AUS No Comments
2Jan/180

Windows 7 64-Bit to Windows 10 Upgrade Error

New year, new OS install. Windows 10 was lagging badly and took around 20 minutes to boot... sure... it was probably PLEX just trying to checksum 4TB of media, but I was sick of it. So, fresh install of Win7 on that 1TB SSD I installed into my previous Vaio. All went well with Windows 7, apart from crappy installation media... but upgrading to Windows 10 took a lot of effort.

Actually, Windows 7 had enough trouble with its own updates. I think that, nowadays, due to the sheer amount of updates that'll try and download and install (at once) on a fresh Windows 7 installation, it's nearly impossible to have them actually all install and succeed.

Therefore the windows updates process took around 10 reboots, with the progress counter getting to 70% and unwinding with an error... but each time more updates would succeed, so it just seemed that they needed intermittent reboots which aren't automated.

Anyway, once I finally had a Windows 7 desktop with an who-knows-how-successful SP1 install, I did the lovely accessibility Windows 10 update. I am hard of seeing, you see?

I came straight away into this error...

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The program can't start because api-ms-win-core-libraryloader-l1-1-1.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem. Re-installing what program? I'm running an installer! :)

After a large amount of googling... I stumbled across a one-liner in this post. Someone briefly mentions swapping wimgapi.dll from your c:\windows\system32\ folder into the c:\windows10upgrade folder... it then just worked!

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Well.. I hope it will... at least it's installing...