superpantoufle
Well-known member
Hi there,
Though a hardcore macuser (and collector) for a long, long time, I have to confess that I am a complete newbie in the Apple II world. I do own an Apple IIgs I got from a friend many years ago. Back then, I remember playing a bit with her and her huge load of floppies, and she suddenly stopped booting. I tried to troubleshoot her a little, and then stored her in my parents' attic.
She's been waiting there for the last decade or so. And now I thought I'd have a try at making her boot again!
What I have is an Apple IIgs with keyboard and mouse, an "AppleColor RGB Monitor", and two 3.5'' floppy drives. Inside the IIgs is what looks like a memory extension card, and a SCSI card.
She starts up fine, and I can play with the control panel. But when I insert a floppy she'll refuse it, and display "Check startup device". She obviously can't find anything to boot from. I read that interesting thread, thinking I was in the same situation. All the floppies were stored along with the IIgs in my parents' attic where it can be pretty hot in summer, and quite cold in winter. So I assumed all the floppies just died from bad storage condition. So I made a new boot floppy as described in the above thread, but that wouldn't boot either.
Then I just tried to stick one of the old floppies in a Mac. And I amazingly saw it mount just fine on the Mac's desktop, with a ProDOS icon and all its files.
So it seems that my floppies aren't dead, but my drives could be (both of them, I tried to switch them to no avail). The eject mechanism do work, as do the red activity LED on their front.
Any suggestion? What could I try? Thanks in advance!
Though a hardcore macuser (and collector) for a long, long time, I have to confess that I am a complete newbie in the Apple II world. I do own an Apple IIgs I got from a friend many years ago. Back then, I remember playing a bit with her and her huge load of floppies, and she suddenly stopped booting. I tried to troubleshoot her a little, and then stored her in my parents' attic.
She's been waiting there for the last decade or so. And now I thought I'd have a try at making her boot again!
What I have is an Apple IIgs with keyboard and mouse, an "AppleColor RGB Monitor", and two 3.5'' floppy drives. Inside the IIgs is what looks like a memory extension card, and a SCSI card.
She starts up fine, and I can play with the control panel. But when I insert a floppy she'll refuse it, and display "Check startup device". She obviously can't find anything to boot from. I read that interesting thread, thinking I was in the same situation. All the floppies were stored along with the IIgs in my parents' attic where it can be pretty hot in summer, and quite cold in winter. So I assumed all the floppies just died from bad storage condition. So I made a new boot floppy as described in the above thread, but that wouldn't boot either.
Then I just tried to stick one of the old floppies in a Mac. And I amazingly saw it mount just fine on the Mac's desktop, with a ProDOS icon and all its files.
So it seems that my floppies aren't dead, but my drives could be (both of them, I tried to switch them to no avail). The eject mechanism do work, as do the red activity LED on their front.
Any suggestion? What could I try? Thanks in advance!