Floppy drive for PS/2 P70 386 "Lunchbox"

[strollin]

I have 2 of the PS/2 P70 386 "Lunchbox" luggables. Both work and are bootable from the hard drive but neither has a working floppy drive. Does anyone know a source for working drives for these machines?

The FRU number for this drive is 38F5936 and was apparently also used in these machines: Model 55SX (8555), Model 60 (8560), Model 65SX (8565) and Model 80 (8580).

I know the people who recently bought the Model 80's offered on this forum needed these drives so hopefully somone found a good source.

[chuckcmagee]

Me too, me too on the would like to a good source for replacement floppy drives. The vast majority of my P70s also have dead floppy drives. That " flop the drive out at an angle " was a cute idea. Too bad it destroys the drive parts doing it like that.

[strollin]

Is there any alternative? Like I said the machines both work but I'm unable to boot the reference disk to update the settings. Is there an EXE that could be run from a DOS prompt to configure settings?

[Raven]

What kind of money are you willing to lay down for this? I have access to a few PS/2 machines and their associated floppy drives, 2.88MB models with 34-pin connectors.. (same connectors as my 55SX 1.44MB drive, so they should be compatible)

There is an alternative, though, the pinout for that sort of floppy drive is available, and you can separate the power lines, and rewire the connector (or an adapter) to make it into a normal 34-pin data, and then either use a molex-to-mini-molex or rewire the power pins into a mini molex and just hook up a normal floppy. (Run-on sentence ftw?)

That'd be ugly for a permanent solution, but once it's bootable from an HDD you can use an external floppy for data transfers..