:huh:... but you do, as people like you are obviously the same as people like me, we both don't throw things into the bin. Anyways... still curious about the symptoms though, as I'm working on a 1581 repair myself and the symptoms are different from those described in Ray's guide.
braimpy, I unreservedly apologise. I re-read my post and the tone was all wrong. I blame being hungover and tired. I edited the reply before seeing your response hoping you wouldn't see it.
The 1581 concerned was based on one of Joseph's kits (sourced from Lief) and had previously been working fine with a PC floppy mechanism and a modded cable. About a month ago, I got hold of an A500 drive and fitted that, again it worked absolutely fine and now the front plate could be fitted.
So a couple of days ago I was writing a disk image from the PC via zoomfloppy and diskimg, which appeared to work successfuly. When I then tried to read the directory on real hardware, the drive responds with "searching for" and spins forever.
I first suspected a duff disk but it doesn't read known good disks either. I then swapped the mechanism back for the PC drive, burnt another ROM, tried different hosts (including a plus/4) and even swapped out the power supply, none of which made any difference, which leaves the fault somewhere on the controller board.
It still responds correctly to other commands though, it will seemingly format a disk and even save files (I haven't been able to determine if the disk is formatted correctly or if the files have been saved as I have no other 3.5" drive to read the disks on.) I then read through Ray's document which doesn't provide any pointers other than saying this was one of the most reliable drives C= ever shipped. :dry:
All the initialisation variations appear correct WRT formatted/unformatted disks so it must be reading something. As it's at least appearing to format and save correctly it's talking to the host sensibly, so that kind of rules out the 6502 and ROM.
I have been round 50% of the board with a signal probe looking for stuck lines and found nothing obvious so it will just require time and patience at some point in the future.
Rob