Northstar Advantage won't read floppies.

[Brent Martin]

I am hoping someone has had the same problem and can point me in the right direction.

I have a Northstar Advantage computer and it comes up and displays "Load System" on the screen.

Nothing else happens. I hit Enter or Return on the keyboard and nothing happens. The red light on the floppy drive never comes on. I have a boot floppy that came with the machine. I don't think it's the floppy that is the problem.

The machine has a hard drive, and it powers up and the red light comes on. My son and I have tried a lot of things and have not found a solution.

The system has a separate 8086 processor card and RAM for running MS-DOS version 1, I think.

Nothing seems to work. Could the drive be missing a jumper?

I have 4 different Tandon TM100-2A drives. I tried swapping drives, nothing different.

[David Jones]

Check the keyboard. Those have foam rubber buttons inside with metalized Mylar on one side. The foam has a bad habit of rotting out in those kinds of keyboards. I had to replace all of those foam buttons in mine with homemade ones. To check you will need to take the keyboard out of the Advantage and then remove all the tiny screws on the back side.

At the load system prompt, you can also try D2 to boot from the second disk. Or Ctrl-C to get into the mini monitor.

Otherwise, it sounds like a nice machine with those optional parts in it :)

David

[David Laffineuse]

Brent - I have similar issues with my Northstar, did you ever find the problem?