I only have a stock Model 1 Genesis (
motherboard scan!), unmodded (as of today!), with a custom-made
AV cable (Someday i will make a better cable, that one is a cheap hack done with a 32X G1 AV adapter, and it's really fragile ;D)
Once i get/build a flashcart, the first thing that i will do is a region mod (solder pin headers and set the region with jumpers. No fancy switches, because i don't want case mods). Also, i need to repair the headphones output, because the cable to the tiny jack PCB is broken, AND i want STEREO RIGHT NOW!!!
As for soldering: me + soldering iron = EXTREME DANGER AND CHAOS
Now, back to the 5.25" floppy fun... as expected, here are the pics of the last "Floppy Drive Raid"!
- The candidates for "
American My Next Floppy Drive":
From top to bottom:
- Samsung drive: DEAD (broken loading mechanism, missing power connection)
- Chinon FR-506 #1: DEAD (refused to work)
- Epson SD-600 #1:
WORKS! (it's FAST, but not because that someone wrote "48X" over it)
- Chinon FR-506 #2: DEAD (broken lever, refused to work)
- Chinon FR-506 #3: DEAD (broken lever mechanism, refused to work)
- Chinon FR-506 #4: DEAD (broken lever, refused to work)
- Epson SD-600 #2:
WORKS! (oddly enough, this one was marked as "BAD"
)
Not pictured:
- Mitsumi (Newtronics) made-in-Japan: actual drive: refused to read, heads broken
- Chinon FR-506 #5: original AcerMate 333s part: broken lever mechainsm, DEAD.
It's damn easy to take apart that Mitsumi drive for perform maintenance tasks: remove the lever, the faceplate (2 screws), remove the top shield (2 screws), remove the top half (contains the loading/lever mech, 4 screws), unplug one cable, and watch out with the heads when pulling/replacing it.
(yes, those dots on the lower half are rust marks...)
- Testing the "48X" SD-600:
If you want to test it on a IBM/Lenovo Netvista/Thinkcentre: their BIOS only supports ONE floppy drive! So you need to unplug the actual 3.5" FDD (if any), find a cable with two card edge connectors for 5.25" FDDs, and setup your "new" drive in the BIOS. They're also picky: Chinon drives DON'T WORK AT ALL (either that, or i got 5 bricks on my hands)
- The other drive has a cleaner faceplate, and it's as fast as the other SD-600:
- One of our sane test floppies was a MSDOS bootdisk, loaded with PCSHELL. Guess what? The floppy STILL BOOTS! And on a P3-933!
(We have 256MB of RAM, but DOS is DOS, and 640K should be enough)
- I'm sure that IBM didn't offered a 5.25" FDD as an option for Netvista stations... Too bad
Let's restore it!
And now, the prize of this quest! I picked the "doomed" SD-600, because the faceplate color was almost a perfect match for the 386 case (a not-so-yellowish white):
No pure iron body means no rust... Cool
("MALO" means "BAD" in Spanish. BAD drive? It's more like "BADass new drive!")
- Drive mounted on Marika, with lots of floppies for testing:
I used WinImage ($hareware) to read, write and format floppies. The original plan was to use rawwritewin, but it crashed on every run, so i had to pull a old WinImage 8.00 installer from my pendrive. WinImage works nicely under 386's boxes, and can deal with all kinds of floppies, including those 5.25"s. I had run into the classic "can't read sector 0" errors when mixing bad and good floppies, but a hard reboot fixes everything. Now, where is my
credit card Winimage keygen?
Experiment result:
TOTAL SUCCESS! 
Now let's sign a petition for force floppy drive/disk makers to relaunch 5.25" drives! 3.5" drives SUCKS!!!
Instead, use a REAL defrag tool (Raxco PerfectDisk yields excellent results).
)