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Old 19th Mar 2017, 6:23 pm   #5
Specmaster
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Join Date: Mar 2017
Location: Chelmsford, Essex, UK.
Posts: 38
Default Re: Amstrad PPc512 and PPC640 luggable computers

Many thanks for the info and help so far chaps, I didn't expect to get results with such speed. The drives are infact direct drive as suspected and everything appears to be working as good as the day as they left the factory.

Both machines are in really good condition, look like they have never had batteries fitted so no corrosion in that dept. The only problem with the 512 is the slight discolouration of the plastics seeing as it was the lighter of the 2 originally.

Problem that I do have is that I only ever had 1 set of boot discs between the pair and I never got around to making a duplicate until today and that was when I discovered that the 512 never booted correctly, it beeped, the screen showed "Please wait" and then went blank after a few minutes and the disc drive stopped spinning.

The same boot disc will boot the 640 no problems whatsoever, so I set about making a back up copy for the 512 and used the command Diskcopy to copy the boot disc and it gives me the error of an unrecoverable error when trying to read the boot disc in preparation for copying it. It does carry on and appears to be copying and asks for the source disc to be removed and the destination disc to be swapped over at various points along the way, which I do.

When I check the directory contents of the new disc, it is blank and the disc name is a jumbled set of characters.
I then went to this link http://www.retroisle.com/amstrad/pcs/software.php and downloaded the compressed floppy image files of the 2 discs required. In the folder is a readme file and the following is what it says.
“PPC System disks
================

This archive contains images of the two system disks that were originally supplied with the PPC 512 and PPC640. Disk 1 contains MS-DOS .3 and a copy of the "Organiser" program while disk 2 contains the "Mirror" communication software that was designed for use with the modem built into the PPC640.

To make new copies of the system disks take two floppy disks that have been formatted to 720K (NOT! 1.44MB) and then give the command:

FDCOPY DISKn.CFI A:

where n is 1 or 2 and A: is the drive containing the 720K floppy disk. This will use the FDCOPY.COM that is also in the ZIP file to resurrect the complete compressed floppy image (CFI) onto the disk.

Cliff Lawson
cliffl@amstrad.com

My main PC runs Windows 10 and FDCOPY is not a windows command and so the system blocks it from being run. Putting the discs into the 640 and running the command simply makes a copy of the compressed file for disc1 onto a blank disc inserted into drive B, it does not extract it at all.

I wanted to try and do this case my original discs might have been corrupted by the presence of a magnetic field etc?

I have tried everything I can think of trying to get a fresh copy of the boot up disc made without any success.
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