[Davey Boy]

Hello Everyone,

I have an MH600E and it had sat around for so long before I bought it that the battery is dead and the machine constants are gone.

I did get a floppy disk with "Parameters" written on it, but the machine doesn't have a drive and my computer doesn't recognize the disk format. My thought was to enter the constants I know via the console, but I can't seem to get the keystrokes right the enter the data.

My manual says there is a protection switch that has to be set to allow the constants to be entered manually, but I can't find any trace of such a switch. Would anyone know where this mystery switch is, or how to manually enter the parameters?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Davey Boy

[Davey Boy]

Something else that's a bit strange... the display shows an error "Io1" which according to my manual means there is no power to the console. The hydraulic button doesn't light up, but all the other buttons seem to work and the screen too, of course.

Thanks,
Davey Boy.

[Davey Boy]

Soooooooooooo,

Just to confirm, nobody knows where that mystery switch is that lets me input constants?

[thebodger]

the I01 message means the hydraulics and servos are not energized. Basically the machine is in emergency stop condition. Only the control is running. I don't know how well you know this system, so please don't think i'm belittling you here. just trying to help. first, to energize the system you need to press the hydraulic on press button and the clear keypad button within about .5 seconds.so hit the hydraulics button then the clear button. but before all this, if your constants are trashed, the machine will never enegize. look at the machine constants. it's the keypad button on your upper left marked CONST. if you see any constants with crazy values and it displays "incorrect" this means your canstants are trashed. they need to be corrected before you have any hope of going further to power this up. i will leave with this bit of info, before i get into deeper stuff. i know these machines quite well, as i am one of the origanal service thechs from the old ferro technique days back in the 1990's. post back, i'll follow this thread. also look at posts from a guy called "thebodger@roger" in this sub forum. i'm the same guy.

[Davey Boy]

Thank you very much for your reply.

I don't know this system well, at all. The constants are definitely trashed, as there are some which show crazy, incorrect values. As I noted previously, I do have a floppy with the parameters, but not a way to read it, or read them into the machine.

When the machine is powered up, the motors all seem to be energized, but I do understand that doesn't mean they will function properly. I see you too are in Canada. Do you still do service on these beasts?

Thanks again,
Davey Boy.

[thebodger]

Every set of constant that I have seen from a Phillips control is always a simple text file. Although the file may not have a .txt extension, it still is a text file. Can you try to open the file with notepad in Windows, and see what happens?

[Davey Boy]

I will give it a go.

There are 5 computers here, all without 3.5" drives. I'll have a friend look into it for me.

Thank you,
Davey Boy.

[uli12us]

which is 45 minutes north of Toronto.

With what, horse, car, or airplane. I don't know much about Canada, but watched some Tv-features about and they say, the normal transportmedium is a small airplane, like Cessna or similiar.

Somewhere I have a factorysealed Win95 cd with start diskette, thats far before 2000, or I can search for stoneaged Win 3.11 Diskettes, maybe I have even Dos 3.3 Diskettes, but I doubt, you can run those old parts on a modern computer.

[Davey Boy]

Sorry uli12us, I should have been more specific... since I don't have an airplane, not even a small one, or a horse, I based it upon highway time in my trusted Tacoma. Barrie is about 80km from Toronto.

I also have a Win95 disk... somewhere. There are a few "buy & sell" websites around here so I may look and see if anyone is cleaning out their basement and getting rid of an old box. After going through a few hundred constants and only guessing what the values should be, it seems a worthy investment of a couple of dollars.

[thebodger]

If you have a computer that will boot up from a USB port, then you came make a memory flash stick formated to DOS 6 work as your hard disk. I use this often for old software I sometimes need to run. Search the web, you will find how to do this.

[Davey Boy]

That seems like a doable solution. Does DOS6 have special traits?

[thebodger]

you need to make "C80" back to "N=0" to be able to run the machine. "C80" is the unlock or "key" constant for enabling the editing of machine constants. as far as DOS goes, it's a command line OS, there is no fancy GUI to it. you will need to find some old as dirt fart (like me) to help you learn it.

[Davey Boy]

I understand DOS, I just wasn't sure if there was something special about ver 6. The good old c:\ days... it's been a while. I was computing before Windows was a thing, but I do still remember some of the basics.

I formatted a stick to some DOS lite commands, but it's still NFG for reading the disk. Maybe I'll try a more robust stick loaded with more files.

[thebodger]

Can you email me the contents of that floppy? Do you want to see if I can do anything from my end? Shoot me a P.M. and I'll give you my Email address, if you want.

[Davey Boy]

I can't access the disk contents, as I get errors both from Windows and from the DOS prompt using the stick method. I tried another floppy disk to be sure it wasn't the drive and both methods showed me the files on that floppy, so it's disk specific.

[Lohmeyer]

The Maho disks were written as DOS format floppies (FAT file system). All DOS and Windows floppies are FAT file system. So, any PC (DOS, Win3.1, Win95, WinXP, etc.) should be able to read them. My Maho has a floppy drive, and I have the original floppy that came from Maho. This is a 1994 machine. I have never had any issues reading floppies from this machine using Windows XP. I have also easily read 3.5 inch floppies from the DOS era on my WinXP machine. Unfortunately, the problem is most likely your disk is bad.

Another consideration is, it could be you haven't yet found a good 3.5 inch floppy drive to read from. Nobody uses them anymore, and after sitting for a while, they collect dust, or start failing.

But, chances are, the problem with your params disk is even worse than that. You may have ruined the disk the first time you tried to read it. Again, because nobody uses 3.5 inch disks anymore, the drives collect dust over time. Often, the first disk someone puts in such a drive is ruined as it smears a spec of dust on the floppy. I have 3.5 inch drives in all my computers still (because I still use them). But, I always put an unimportant disk in the drive first to let it spin and blow away any dust, and then I put the important disk in the drive. I have ruined several 3.5 inch floppies because of not doing this. I haven't yet had to resort to a disk cleaning kit, though.

Sorry, not what you wanted to hear. If you can get a Win95 system (or DOS) installed, go for it and try to read the disk. I may be wrong. But, chances are the disk is just bad. Your only chance to recover the data is probably to find a program that will bypass the bad sectors and try to read the raw data. Being that the first thing a floppy drive tries to read is the directory information, that means the bad sectors are the directory. But, the good news is, the actual parameters file is probably perfectly intact. It's a highly technical thing to do using a disk sector editor to read such data, but it can be done. The difficulty is that the data on the disk may not be contiguous (i.e. the params file is broken up into several chunks, or worse, there are multiple copies and you have to figure out which chucks are the latest version).

But, please, before you do anything more with that floppy disk, make sure you have a clean floppy disk drive. Read, write, and re-read a new disk in the drive first before putting your params disk in the drive. Otherwise, you are likely to just damage the params disk further. I stop short of suggesting you get a 3.5 inch floppy cleaning kit. They are hard to find, but if you can find one, it wouldn't hurt.

Also, make sure the disk doesn't have moisture damage. Slide open the metal cover on the disk and spin the disk. Look for discoloration on the disk (top and bottom side). This could be moisture. If so, the disk _was_ readable, but as soon as you put a disk with moisture damage in a drive, you immediately ruin the disk - and possibly the drive! There are ways to improve your chances to read such a disk, but since you already tried to read the disk, the damage is already done.

BTW, make sure the write protect notch is enabled on your params disk to make absolutely sure no drive writes to the disk. If you write to the disk even once, you could easily ruin the disk due to a poorly aligned floppy drive.

Sorry for the long post, but I do a lot with vintage computers and old floppies. Floppy disk problems are the #1 issue in trying to get old computers to work. The 3.5 floppies are the worst because it is so easy to ruin them with a single spec of dust. The 5 1/4 inch floppies were _way_ more robust.

Regards,
Mike

[Lohmeyer]

Forgot to say... You said already in another post that the paper tape isn't in the electrical cabinet. But, take another look (look everywhere inside the machine). It might be hidden somewhere. I have seen several people over look the box that holds the paper tape. If you find it, I have a paper tape reader and can help you read the tape. Long shot I know.

Regards,
Mike

[Lohmeyer]

(whoops - double post deleted - ignore this)

[Davey Boy]

Thanks Mike for your great information!

I have been able to read, write and format disks with the drive I have, but there is still no joy with the parameter disk. I found an old boot disk for loading Win95, but was still unable to access the data in the DOS evironment.

There is a 3.5" floppy cleaner around here somewhere, but I am beginning to suspect, as you are, that the disk may be toast. It is write protected and I don't see any discoloration, so perhaps a recovery program will salvage the data. As you noted, that's not going to be easy either.

I haven't dug right to the bottom of the cabinet looking for the tape, but the small box that's supposed to hold it is empty. I will have a good look tomorrow.

Thanks again for your help!

[Lohmeyer]

Google "floppy sector editor". Several options there.

If you are lucky, the disk was formatted and written as a brand new disk. If so, the files will be contiguous on the disk (i.e. the disk hex editor will show the data in order, no mixed up chunks). Then you should be able to get the parameters off the disk easily.

The parameter files are standard ASCII files (text files). So you'll know them when you read the disk with a hex editor. The text will be clear as day in the ASCII columns of the hex editor.

The file will probably be named something like <serial number>.cm where <serial number> is the serial number for your machine. For example, mine is named 120094.cm. What you'll see in the file is something like this:

N0 C2
N1 C6
N2 C512
N3 C1024
N4 C1
N5 C1
N7 C1
N10 C5
.
.
.

Where the N number is the parameter number and the C number is the value. E.g. parameter 3 is written as 1024.

Except in the hex editor, it'll be all combined like this (16 bytes per row):

N0 C2*N1 C6*N2 C
512*N3 C1024*N4
C1*N5 C1*N7 C1*N
10 C5.....

Where you'll see the text as expected separated by CR or CR/LF characters which I have indicated above with a *. Also, there will be a lot of other crap breaking up the chucks of the files. This is sector and other disk housekeeping information. A good disk editor will help sort this stuff out.

I am actually pretty optimistic you'll get some good data if not the entire params file - provided you can get a disk hex editor to read the disk at all. You'll still have to sort through all the data and decide what is correct or not, but hey this is WAY better than not having any params at all.

Alternatively, you might consider sending the disk to a data recovery company and let the professionals do it. It will cost $$, but getting the correct constants is so important, it is well worth it. Your only other options are to hope Maho can send you something (iffy at best) or find someone with the exact same machine and use their params. Even then, there'll be a few numbers that need adjusting or aren't totally correct for your exact machine.

BTW, is this an original disk from Maho, or a blank disk that an end user wrote later? If an original disk, then there will be other files with information like measurements on the machine and some production info. I have never had to use this info (yet).

I also ask because over the years, some params may have been changed to compensate for use and wear on the machine, or changing features or parts. So a disk written later by the end user might actually be better.

If you need help using a disk hex editor, don't hesitate to PM me. Let me know which program you choose and I'll load it myself and walk you through it. I can't recommend any one particular program because I haven't used a hex editor in probably 20 years. But they are relatively simple once you understand a few things.

Regards,
Mike