Help with Restoring Lisa: Error 75

[Frobozz]

Hi All,

I finally found a Lisa (2/10) recently, in non-working condition. I made some progress: I got it to power on, identified that one of the 2 memory boards is bad, cleaned the floppy and got it to receive and eject disks, got the the HD to spin up (that took some doing), but I can't get past this: no matter what media I put into it, I always get a bad system file error. I thought it was just the data on the HD was damaged, that would be no surprise. And if the floppies that came with it (Lisa office 7/7) didn't work, and the Lisa Guide, well, a lot of floppies from the early 80s don't work any more. So I went on a bit of an odyssey getting disk images off the internet back into 400k format (and found out, in the process, that 2 mac pluses, a PB165, PB170, and a mac classic had all died since I last used them), only to have them fail out in the Lisa with exactly the same error.

So I'm wondering... is there maybe some kind of controlled that could have gone bad? Any way to diagnose it?

The keyboard needs to be completely re-padded, as far as I can tell, so using that debugger thing is out of reach for me for the moment. I am hoping to wait on the keyboard repair until I can get the Lisa running. Don't fancy having to do that twice if I can help it.

So what I can try next?

 

[unity]

You got the drive to spin-up, but did you adjust the brake?

 

[bibilit]

Have you had a look here ? :

http://lisafaq.sunder.net/single.html

 

[Frobozz]

on the Brake: yes, that was what finally let it spin up. I have the Pina book, and the lisa repair guide pdf, those have been helpful. And of course the Lisa FAQ. Lots of googling to get me this far, but I ran out of answers, so...

I mean, it could still be that the floppies I made, and the originals, and the HD are all bad. That could easily be true. Before I try to go hunt down someone who has "working" disks, I thought I'd see if this sounds familiar to anyone here.

 

[snuci]

Error 75 relates to the Widget hard drive. Have you completely disconnected the Widget and tried to boot from a floppy without the hard drive attached? Try that if you haven't already, I'm not sure if you are ware but there's a trick to booting from floppy while the Widget is in there. You press a key at a certain time in the boot process but to simplify things, just disconnect the Widget and try to boot from the first Lisa 7/7 disk..

 

[Frobozz]

well, THAT was unexpected.

Thanks for the hint. Here's what I tried:

1. disconnect data cable from widget. left power in place, as that seems to get rerouted to the floppy.

2. restart. Try various floppies. Same thing, error 75. Which, according to a doc I found on mac mothership, could be either internal HD or the internal floppy:

===

Code Icon Symptom Solution

N/A Drive opening No diskette Insert Disk

23 Diskette Unreadable diskette Reformat disk

38 Diskette No startup file on diskette Install system

39 Diskette Drive ROM can't keep up Wrong drive ROM?

40 CPU card Memory management problem

41 CPU card Selection logic problem CPU card missing?

42 CPU card Video circuit problem

43 CPU card Parity circuit problem

44 Lisa Unexpected NMI interrupt

45 Lisa Bus error

46 Lisa Address error

47 Lisa Unexpected exception

48 Lisa Illegal instruction

49 Lisa Line 1010 or 1111 trap

50 I/O board Keyboard VIA error 6522A chip?

51 I/O board Parellel VIA error 6522A chip?

52 I/O board I/O COPS error COPS chip?

53 I/O board Keyboard COPS error COPS chip?

54 I/O board Clock error

55 I/O board Serial port A problem Z8530 chip?

56 I/O board Serial port B problem Z8530 chip?

57 I/O board Disk controller problem Lite Adapter?

58 I/O board I/O board access error

59 I/O board I/O COPS error

60 I/O board I/O or keyboard error

70 Memory board Read/write error

71 Memory board Parity error

75 Internal HD System files are damaged Reinstall System

75 External HD System files are damaged Reinstall System

75 Floppy disk System files are damaged Reinstall System

75 Expansion card System files are damaged Reinstall System

80 Internal HD Drive cable is disconnected Check cable

80 External HD Drive cable is disconnected Check cable

81 Internal HD No response from drive Adjust solenoid?

81 External HD No response from drive

82 Internal HD Drive doesn't answer

82 External HD Drive doesn't answer

83 Internal HD Other drive problems

83 External HD Other drive problems

84 Internal HD Boot blocks are damaged Low level format?

84 External HD Boot blocks are damaged Low level format?

85 Internal HD Drive can't keep up

85 External HD Drive can't keep up

90 Expansion card No card in that slot

91 Expansion card Can't start from that card

92 Expansion card Problem with the card ROM

93 Expansion card Other card problem

===

3. So then, because I'm dumb, decide only NOW that it would be a good idea to try removing the bad memory board. I had left it in after I confirmed which was the bad one, because it always had that "continue" option. Anyway, take that out, still with HD semi-disconnected, and try floppies again. This time, I get different errors! (progress?)...

I get 10726 with both the Lisa 7/7 (1 of 5) disk that came with the lisa, and the 1 of 5 disk I downloaded from the internet.

I get 10735 with Lisa Guide disk.

both of those appear to relate to issues with the boot blocks/files on the start up disk:

---

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA40202?viewlocale=en_US

Error Meaning

10725 Damaged file system or file contents

10726 Profile error, problem with boot tracks

10727 Memory Error

10728 Boot file is missing or damaged

10729 "

10730 "

10731 "

10732 "

10735 "

10736 "

10737 "

---

4. Seems like I'm getting more specific errors, so let's see if I get anything other than 75 from the Internal HD. Plug that back in. hmm. LOTS of spinning and start up time. Then... BANG! surprise: Welcome to Mac XL. bluuuurgh.

So the hard drive appears to be fine. I've never seen the Mac XL mod before, but as I understood it, it included a hardware mod that made the pixels square. They don't seem to be square to me, but maybe the Lisa only got "close to square"?

I couldn't get any floppies to register after the Mac XL part took over. I tried a 400k floppy for a mac 128k that I know is good, but it never showed up on the desktop at all. If I hadn't de-greased that eject mechanism, and had smooth floppy behavior on the Lisa-part of the startup, I would have said it was acting like a stuck floppy ejector. but I don't know... maybe it's software related?

At least I was able to start up MS Word and test the keyboard. 10 keys work, so that's good. The keyboard is not fried or anything, just needs re-padding.

Anyway, thanks for help. I think I have to decide now whether I want to try and restore it to the Lisa OS. I'll dig into that and come back again if I need some more help. I bought it with the understanding it was a Lisa 2/10, not a mac XL, but it's not like it was running when the guy sold it, so no hard feelings or anything, just a surprise.