Yeah, I've opened in a couple times. I used white lithum grease on the head rails, didn't make any difference. The belt seems to be fine, and it is indeed spinning the drive, and the heads do move. On further testing, my dad was able to (once) get it to read a floppy from another machine (just a directory listing). Couldn't actually copy files off of it, and the files on it were just
shortcuts as a test.
I will put some more work into it at some point, or replace it, but I have been
keeping an eye out for VersaBay CDROM drives, as that would be ideal. Also trying to get hold of a PCMCIA ethernet card that will actually work in this machine. It seems that cardbus cards are not supported.
However, my newest issue is accessing the files for this machine on the NEC website. Their FTP server is down (apparently in the process of being moved?) and so all the drivers/BIOS updates for this machine are not accessbile. I emailed them a couple times, and was told that the FTP server should be back up
at some vague point in the future. Well, it's been a month now, and no change.
I have been trying to find copies of the BIOS update in particular, but even searching for the exact file name leads nowhere. It seems nobody bothered to backup or mirror these files. Even the Wayback Machine doesn't have copies (though it did snapshot the download page, I guess it only follows HTTP links and not FTP ones).
The page is at
https://support.necam.com/Drivers/?m=498 and the files I am interested in are L6100PHD.EXE as well as L6100TB3.EXE ... on the extreme off-chance that someone here either has the files or might know where to look. I am going to check out some other BBS's, but I doubt they would have this kind
of software.
The funny thing is, in the manual for this laptop, they actually list the NEC BBS as the place to go to download updates! I thought that was pretty awesome. Even in 1994 they were still using a BBS to update users. The last updates for this line of machines seems to be around 1999. I am really hoping I can get my hands on those updates!
Thanks for all the ideas, folks :)
Cheers
cb»» caAurelius
Badass Engineer
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