I was going through our old stuff and resurrected our old Amiga 500 computer from the dusty basement. It has the upgrade card installed in the bay underneath to give it 1mb of ram. Physically it's clean, and in working order and I was able to boot up one of the old workbench disk copies, and the battery on the ram was still working fine and no leaks. Also have the original commodore monitor, mouse, power supply, cables, etc.
Many of my other disks are coming up as bad / corrupt /etc. I think the drives are on their last legs... OR the disks may be bad from years in the basement... I have no way to really tell. I tried all the experiments I could, but I don't have reliable disk media to test the drives and find out if it's the drives or the disks which are bad. None of my existing PC's even have a disk drive for me to check!
I also have an external drive which I took apart and swapped with the internal drive and it booted off a different workbench copy but disks that work in one drive don't seem to be compatible with the other drive. They are equally LOUD though.
I have a bunch of original software and games including Tetris, where in the world is carmen sandiego, etc... but I am afraid to try them if the drives are not reliable since I don't want to screw up the disks.
I also have the original workbench disks which were used ONCE to make copies and then put away. We religiously used copies of copies to preserve the old disks.
If anybody is interested in this stuff, I'd like to make sure it gets a good home. I can provide pictures, of my recent dis-assembly/cleaning and video of booting if you want it. I really loved this computer and I want to make sure it doesn't just end up in a landfill. I don't have the time or the knowledge to restore it effectively.
PM me with any interest.
-Dan
