Acorn Archimedes A5000: Restoration Part 2

In my previous post I managed to get the A5000 to reliably boot. But due to battery damage it cannot use any drives. The restoration continues…

Port Cleanup

At the end of the previous post, the IDE port looked like this underneath.

After applying some vinegar, cleaning with some isopropyl and using a fibreglass to remove any excess corrosion from the port it started to look a bit better.

There were definite broken traces, I found two on the floppy side where the traces go through the IDE port and four on the IDE that were broken. Luckily for each one there was a via nearby, so I started by using my desoldering gun to clear the vias for the effected lines. I then used enamelled wire underneath to like the hole for the socket to the via.

I soldered the floppy socket back on as I could test this whilst I wait for a new IDE socket (I don’t appear to have any in stock).

There is some trimming and cleanup needed, but this is good enough for testing. The board was wired back up and tested.

The floppy drive now works! It loads this coverdisk and runs the into to the Star Fighter 3000 demo. It doesn’t get any further, I think because Acorn Computing’s decompressor uses too much RAM. But I’m happy it gets this far.

IDE Port

A little later on the replacement IDE port arrived so I soldered this in as well.

I plugged in the IDE drive that came with the machine, told it that it had a drive installed and it immediately popped up. It changed the icons and background as well.

When booting from it, errors appeared due to not having a network.

Once booted via this IDE drive the system behaves “weird”, but at least this confirms the IDE works.

Reassembly

Now I think it is time to reassemble the machine (at least until I find something else wrong). The floppy drive is put back onto the cage. I’ve put a CF adaptor on the IDE port and upgraded the ROMs to a set of 3.10 I had lying around.

Unfortunately the formatting tool doesn’t work with storage devices this large and Jon Abbott’s Partition Manager is throwing errors when formatting it. I don’t think it is compatible with this machine, so I’m awaiting some replacement smaller cards to arrive.

HDD Digging

I plugged the hard drive into my RiscPC to analyse the contents further. There isn’t much data on the drive, just a few applications. Judging by the logs in one of the applications, it was likely last used in 1997. There is also a file which shows that it was used for the BBC French Service, which confirms it is a BBC World Service computer.

Next Steps

I have several things coming for this which should help me get further with it. Lots more testing to do, then there is the cleaning phase. Watch this space!