I recently stripped down my two PF-10’s and managed to reassemble one working drive from the components. The drive is working quite well, the only real problem is the battery is only lasting about 30-40 minutes before needing a lengthy recharge. However this at least gives me enough time to perform a few tasks.
Today I formatted some disks using Copydisk, I found some old 1.0 MB double sided double density disks which seem to work well, the high density ones that I tried did not work. I then daisy chained the TF-20 and the PF-10 to the PX-8 by running the cable from the TF-20 into the back of the PF-10. This required opening up the PF-10 battery compartment in order to flick a dip switch to ensure there were no drive letter conflicts.
This set up gives you the PF-10 as drive F and the TF-20 dual drives as D and E. The PF-10 came with some old disks and I took the opportunity to copy their contents using PIP onto some 5.25″ disks just in case the PF-10 dies again. This included some original copies of Microsoft Basic and Compiler. That proved to be enough work for the main battery and the back-up battery light began to flash. It’s a shame the unit won’t run off of the AC adapter however I’m just thrilled it’s now working at all.
I shall use Filink to further back up the files I transferred today onto my bridge machine and I shall see if there’s any chance of building another working PF-10 from the left over components.