Tandy 1500HD

[mpickering]

Hi all,

I just brought my bargain Tandy 1500HD back to life.

I bought the machine for $1. The seller advertised it as having hard drive issues. When turned on, it wouldn't read the drive. So I download FreeDOS 1.0 and began to play.

The initial boot disk froze the machine. I found a basic disk that did boot to an A: prompt. Good news, this meant the floppy drive was working fine. I got copies of the MS-DOS 3.3 FORMAT and FDISK utilities. FDISK kept giving "Error reading fixed disk" errors. I thought the drives was totally pooched.

I dug around and managed to find a copy of an enhanced FDISK (one that ships with FreeDOS that I didn't have on my disk). Ran it and voila! It saw the drive! So I partitioned it, reboot and formatted it as a system disk. Lo and behold, she booted up on the C: drive. All 20 glorious megabytes.

Not too shabby for a 22 year old machine.

Now, what to put on it? I'm thinking Telix (for serial console use for my Unix workstations) and maybe Windows 2.0 just for the heck of it.

I consider this machine a very good bargain.

Matt

[Vlad]

Sounds like you got a good deal on it. Ever hear of a program called "Kill Disk"? Its suppose to be a pretty heavy format program. I've rescused many a hard drive with it. It takes quite a long time though. I've also used Seagate Diskwizard but I'm not sure if they would see an HD that old.

-VK