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Please note also - THIS BLOG ENDS HERE WITH THE LAST ENTRY FROM NOVEMBER 9th 2021.

I have prepared a new blog with wordpress at https://vintagecomputing.info !!!

Thank you.

A real beauty, this IBM PS/2 P70 - a 386 based machine with an ESDI harddrive.

But also a delicate device, because meanwhile the floppy drive often could make problems (can be related with capacitors on the floppy drive board) and also the ESDI drive is NOT unproblematic. If you run SCANDISK (from MS-DOS 6 or later), and if you get after each program run loop more and more bad clusters, you have "disk snow". This means your drive is dying slowly. Also, trying to low level these ESDI drives is NOT easy, you should NOT use drive manager software for this task. There is a special setup floppy disk for this purpose, and there is a secret key for entering the low level format menu (press Ctrl-A within the normal diagnose main menu). But even then it could fail (this happened for my try). Can be related with the "bad sector table" which should be existing for each ESDI drive. Don't know an other reason, because otherwise if the drive controller is faulty, I would get errors while loading/saving files. But all things saved on hard drive works smoothly (no errors). Regardless of that, also the display can make problems.
The plasma display is - if it works - not too bad, see the second picture driving "Pole Position II"...

Last but not least the keyboard is excellent, similar to the famous "clicky" IBM PS/2 keyboards for the IBM desktop computers (but a bit more compact).

See "related link" for a related site / a source for the setup & diagnose disk for the P70.