Getting my non-working IBM PS2 P70 back into shape. 

You need 3 things - 80387 coprocessor, 2.88Mb floppy, and OS/2 version 2.0! What a great find!

Thank you so much for this video, I bought a p70 and spent ages fighting with the floppy, some guides made it seem a lot harder to use a modern floppy but sure enough I got it working. Right now I have it running through USB with a wire that I made because I didn't want to mess with the wiring of the P70 power supply but now that it works I suppose in the future I can make it self contained I imagine a gotek would plug in just fine in the same way if I cut the 12v pin off if I ever get tired of real floppies. Have to look for another old PC floppy drive too as I sacrificed the only one I had

Man, I am soooo jealous lol. I really have a soft spot for these since I worked at an IBM PC dealership in the 90's. For some reason I thought they were the coolest things, especially running OS/2. The only issue I recall with these was the floppy drive being problematic, but otherwise a very solid machine.

The explanation of the pins on the replacement diskdrive to make it usefull was top notch. Tnx for going that extra mile...

0:54 that computer you have on that time stamp we had one back in the day !! with the green strip !!

Got one of these wonderful "drag-top" babies from my father when moving from home for studies in the early 90's. Win 3.11, diskdoubler, word and Eye of the beholder and then the HDD was full. But it was all i needed :D

I once owned an entire basement of PS/2 Model 80 and 90 servers that a shoe store factory was tossing. Nobody wanted any of it. There was at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars of equipment if you went by the new prices - network cards by the dozens, SCSI drives and adapters, processor upgrades - amazing. The build quality on IBM equipment was and is absolutely the best. Up until recently (and possibly now), Lenovo continued this tradition of fantastic build quality with the best components. This computer of yours is magnificent!

Incredible work. This will give me nightmares. Kafka for electrical engineers.

I've never seen one of these machine before, but it reminds me of a Sun Microsystems Voyager that I used briefly in the 1990s. The built in LCD screen tilted in a similar manner to the one on your IBM, and it was also intended to be a portable computer.

Not the only drive that mapped some of the logic pins for power. Chinon as well as Alps did it. Check out some of the Amstrad 286/386's like the PC5286.

This was a fun video, thank you. Nice job on the floppy. Kind of funny, I have a P70 and when I opened it for the first time I had the same loose heat sink sitting there. Never did figure out what it came off of.

Will you do another video with this exciting machine one day? There are not many videos online featuring plasma displays.

I have repaired this computer last year. Its a fun machine. I have changed the floppy drive and the retention of memory banks brake very easy do to hardening of the plastics.

Oooh, I love your videos RetroSpector! New sub!

As Always, good job mister Spector. Take care.

After one minute into the video, am already excited.

There is not too many parts on a PS/2 that are standard. The P70 and P75 are even worse. Those floppy drives would die shortly after coming out of the box. Thankfully they were usually easy to replace since most had edge connectors on them. And there are no less than 6 different variations on these drives too even though they are all nearly identical in function.

2:43 - I could smell this dust through my screen

Not sure if I'm a spuit-11 here, but I've heard you say "Lord and behold" in a couple videos now. It's "Lo and behold". Great content though, makes me wish I hadn't gotten rid of my old machines.

My god what I loved this machine! Had this machine for a couple of years in the begining of the 90's. Tested so many MCA-cards (not that many;-) IBM screwed big time after this machine;-(

Where did you find the info on the floppy pin out? About to perform similar surgery

I have one of these. Those floppies.. Thanks for showing how to use a regular one.

Amazing machine! This plasma screen is very beauty and sexy! New sub ;D Are possible to play games on that? It will be really cool if you do that.

9:51 Those "capacitors" are a combination of two ferrite beads and a ceramic capacitor. Those absolutely never fails, so not an issue.

Those machines are really beautiful and cool. The only reason I don't consider rescuing one is because they don't usually come with a hard drive and sound card tho, so they are not very useful

I have a P70 and I had the EXACT same problem. And I did the same, take it apart, lay it on the table and it just suddenly worked with an external screen. So I put it back together and...nothing. Took it back apart - nothing. Dead screen. The long beep and 2 short is a video card issue. So I took the video card off and replaced the 4 electrolytic capacitors with new ones. I had to use special solder to remove the old stuff. But low and behold I put it back together but it now works perfectly - plasma and all. So my guess is unless you recap the video board, it won’t work consistently for long....

Great find! This thing is awesome!

totally agree with the ps/2 line, more im falling in love with the p70, by your fault ive bought one! XD mine is an poor andandonned model (barn find) who need some attention and care. where do you find reference disk? it s my first ibm in my collection, my third luggable model. nice video as all of you! take care

I hope you can find a replacement 1.44 meg ibm drive because the PS/2 floppy disk drives are cool.

Great video! I have the same issue with mine you had in the beginning of your video with the display not turning on and the long beep followed by two short beeps. Do you have any thoughts on what you did during the disassembly that may have fixed this issue? I did remove the back cover and disconnect and reconnect the ribbon cable coming out of the video card. Nothing looked corroded or suspect. I left the ribbon cable unplugged and turned on the machine and got the same beeps.

@RetroSpector78 .. 3:36 .. that heat sink is for the chip to the left of 386 .. It has thermal paste on it??....... 20:17 .. Windows 3.11 ?? .. Where is the network card?? AWSOME Machine!!

Will you revisit the gorgeous machine someday?

Hey. Great video !! How did you get the floppy drive out ? You never showed how you removed it from the case. Do you just pull it out or is there screws that need to be removed ?

Some years ago, I had such a system around left for scrap ! Don´t know what happend with it, moving away ?

The Microchannel Architecture slot looks a bit similar to a PCI-E x16 slot, does it?

ESDI drives used the same cables as ST-506 interface drives, IBM deviated from this for the P70.

Great Machine, mine seems have a vga problem, sometime Plasma screen not show anything, if attach external vga monitor (ps2 monitor) nothing.. vga card problem ?

Thank you for this video, really great. I've had one of those since its heyday. I had it stored away and recently unpacked it. Obviously it didn't work butt I got it going (after replacing the floppy) and was working but then it started to fail intermittently. On power on, the kb flashes, the power light comes on, the hard disk drive seeks and then nothing. The usual memory count during POST doesn't happen. I have removed all cards, RAM, etc, cleaned everything up, reseated everything but the poor thing refuses to boot. There's no obvious thing on the motherboard or the memory which is what I can only think of, based on the symptoms. Is there a schematic with voltages I can use ? Any ideas ? I read where this is not uncommon and the boards slowly "die".

What you did was a workaround, but what you should have done was attempt to repair the original IBM drive. I'm sure all that you would have needed to do is re-lubricate the rails that the head slides on and it'll be fine. That's a common problem with old floppy drives, the lubricant dries up and the servo can't move the head anymore. Some light machine oil would do the trick. Try doing that before looking at completely discarding that old IBM floppy drive first. As for the caps, I would ignore that.. if you get motor spin, the drive is halfway to working.

how much did u pay for it? I had one back in like 2006 I only paid $50 for back then but I later on sold it and now I kinda regret doing that because they are so expensive now.

Hello and thank you for this video! Can I ask you for an opinion? I recently found my old ibm model P70 386 in the attic. I tried to turn it on and it starts and the monitor works, the problem is that it shows me the error number 113 and it does nothing else. A quick research and I found that the 113 error stands for “PS/2 MicroChannel arbitration error”...do you know how to solve this? Sorry for the long post and for the request, thank you for your time!

4:32 - you said 'obviously' the battery was dead, but how did you know? Is there some visual indication?

Wow how are you able to fix these old computers. I have some old stuff and those projects seem daunting

so taking it all apart and clean it with air and put it all back in place made it work?

very interesting machine, unusual

I had this exact same model for school. Mine had it's hard drive die.

Hi loved your video and got me inspired to restore an old ps/2 but the floppy hack didn't work for my 35sx, it gives me error 604 . Don't understand why.any ideas ?

Do you know if installing a 387 means that I need to install or setup the system again?

Hey, glad you got your P70 working again! Mine is still struggling with some video problems, unfortunately... I've replaced the caps in my P70's floppy drive with ceramic caps: twitter.com/kpanic/status/1115193356622155776 They're cheap as dirt and, not having any liquid electrolyte, should last forever... Those PS/2 hard drives are actually IDE hard drives, connected to the MCA system bus. That's why they are neither ATA nor XTA compatible. The controller is embedded on the drive PCB, either a MFM controller (for 20-40MB drives) or an ESDI controller (for larger drives). If the drive should decide to stop working one day and a replacement is unobtainable, you could plug an MCA SCSI adapter card into the system and replace the original one with a SCSI drive.

when i was younger i used to fix these was cool when they first came out waaayback

at 5 seconds i can see a desktop in the rack. It's the 2nd from the right. I have the same one with an ESCOM badge, which badge is on yours?

i have one and it used to work but now it says error 10482 wich seems to be Controller transfer acknowledge error i have tryed reseating the harddrive connector cable on the motherboard and on the disk but doesnt seem to solve it sadly so now i have no ideer what to do , and if it is fixable so i just starts in the ibm basic menu now

een belgische 8 bit guy channel met veel meer kennis ;)

Great video! I'm just trying to figure out why my display no longer works on my P70. Aside from dismantling and cleaning, did you find out why it wasn't starting initially?

I love my P70. Have had to replace the floppy (hacked in a standard one as this one has power over the ribbon cable as you say, but you can make up a cable easily enough, it's just hard finding a drive where you can use the original eject button) and hard drive so far and the clips for the screen have recently broken. Edit - Oh OK I have now watched the whole video :)

What is the nearly square black connector at 2:14?

Wait, how the heck did you pull 5V from pin 3? I thought all the lower pins were ground? Trying to follow you with the mod of my drive but I am confused!

My father bought the same model in 95-96 for almost the price of a modern pc lol... just because it was "portable"... I remember it, he somewhat thought it was a good deal. xD

Could you connect. VGA to this screen if you had a dead machine with a working display?

I need help about it: ive refurb three standard floppy drives to ibm ps2 p70 according to this great video with success + one recapped stock working unit. ive got a big problem with my ps2 line desktop model, the 55sx. it wont boot, after a normal seeking floppy drive, classic error message appears 161 163, then (at the time when it could run normally a ref disk or other boot disk) dont boot just initiate the drive during 0.5sec, the book logo appear. if i press f1, the floppy drive initiate during 0.5 sec then go to the ibm basic. none of my working drives (4!) on my p70 work on my model 55sx. To achieve my test, ive just bought a new old ibm stock spare motherboard, (not the same review) and it do the same things. ive also replace my dallas chip with newer one (build year 2020) or test with my two working modded dallas chips. my two ibm planar have 40 pins floppy connector with ibm 34 pins floppy cable. i dont know if the 5v on the pin 3 on 40 pins floppy connector is enough to drive the ...drive! ( i ve just suspected that my main motor run slowly even if the seeking is ok), please any idea?

Delightful !!!!!

The funny part is that pocket computers already existed. For me it was like people liked the floppy systems and large desktops/laptops/variants much longer than is healthy. I understand why "going back" is interesting as someone messed up with the compatibility here and there with the new.

This was my dream ms dos computer, but I didn't know MCA wasn't very used like PCI, and the impossibility to find one for a decent price keep me away from owning one unit

ware did you find the reference disk

That special greasy dust that comes from smokers.

That is a beaut....oh the days lol

Sony floppies have the pinout backwards. The key on top should put pin 1 on the far right side. I have a 720k Sony floppy that's the same way, buggers!

Cool!

Neat-o!

is the floppy drive cable like a tandy cable. i'm not sure which 1000 model powered the drive through the cable but one did.

17:05 “Modern disk drive” :-D

I have an ibm 5155 I’m trying to fix but I lack the brain cells to do much to help my efforts

IBM was first to the Luggable AIO form factor, ASUS' mothership has nothing on this. It doesn't even have a handle!

Now run 8088 domination on this.

A beauty (oxo)

👍👍mooi👍👍

For making an eject button You will need a 3d 🖨️

a big blue computer?... bit it's small and grey!

I had one of thoses

You could have modded a cable instead of ruining the floppy drive

Un français as utilisé sa ? On as tous vu le Ms dos en français et le Windows pour workgroup également en français. Ou l'as tu trouvé ? (Where did you find it ?)

I have three of these, and all of them had bad caps on the floppy drives. I rather not modify a newer drive and wish to keep the systems original. Anyone know of someone who does mail-order re-cap work? RetroSpector78, want a side job? hah :)

Would you just look at it!

3d print button.

Plasma screens give me a headache

Are you french ?