PB180C Floppy Disk causes shutdown

[EspiritLaguna89]

Hi all, weird issue; I've got a PB180C and it works very well- starts up fine, SCSI drive seems to be in great shape. But for whatever reason, when inserting a floppy disk in the built in drive it seemingly locks up the computer (can't click on anything) and then shows a 'disk unreadable error' and prompts to eject. When you then eject the disk, after a few seconds the machine just powers off. It turns on again like nothing happened.

It seems to me that the drive is bad, so I'm looking into swapping it out or taking it apart to clean/examine, but is there any other associated problem I could be facing here? Maybe a board or a hard drive issue I might be overlooking?

 

[joshc]

Sounds like a weak power supply, or a bad drive. Have you got another power adapter you can try with?

 

[EspiritLaguna89]

Sounds like a weak power supply, or a bad drive. Have you got another power adapter you can try with?

I have a power adapter from a PB165 but they seem to have different outputs so I didn't want to risk using it on the 180C

 

[joshc]

180C power needs are 7.5V 3A.

 

[EspiritLaguna89]

180C power needs are 7.5V 3A.

Hmm yeah that's what I'm using, the other one is 7.5V 2A.

 

[joshc]

Quite often the power adapters need recapping, these power supplies are very old now. You can test the voltage it is supplying with a multimeter. Or you could buy a new adapter (doesn't have to an Apple one), some are adjustable voltage and come with multiple barrel tips so you can use them for other machines.

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

Don’t think it’s necessarily PSU related. If so, it would likely shut off during access. Sounds like a really bad system error. It can actually cause behavior like this. On my PowerBook 100, there’s one incompatible game that will just immediately restart the computer if I launch it. Surprised me the first time it happened. You should try a different adapter for sure, but the timeline suggests it’s something else, maybe drive related. Completely true that these AC adapters need caps done though!

 

[Forrest]

I seem to remember a similar problem when inserting an 800KB floppy disk into my PB520c. 1.4 MB disks work fine in my computer.