Akai S2000 weirdness

[Cortinoias]

So I just bought an S2000, and while in cosmetically immaculate condition, it won't read a floppy. The drive itself spins up just fine, but seems to reset itself every couple seconds with a click, almost like a power cycle. I opened the unit up to look for broken solder joints, and discovered a random a*s capacitor on the backside if the motherboard that didn't look official at all, and there were no other components. Can anyone else with a working one of these shed some light on the cap? Is it supposed to be there? Is it a mod? If not I'd love to get suggestions as to why the drive might be stopping and starting.

[madtheory]

Post pics. Check the service manual. Assuming it has the SCSI board, just don't use the floppy. Get a SCSI2SD.

[Cortinoias]

If you have a link to the service manual I would greatly appreciate it, I'll post pics when I'm able. Service manual seems to be lost to time, I can't find it anywhere online.

[Cortinoias]

Got some pictures, here's the top of pcb just incase there's something obvious I'm missing

Front of pcb

Here's the back:

Back of pcb

You can see the cap looks pretty out of place, and it isn't marked on the board. It is the same type of cap as used on the front though as far as I can tell.

Here's a closeup of the cap

Closeup of capacitor, showing messy soldering

Notice the leftover residue, hardly looks professional to me, if I can do better I doubt a machine did it.

Any info on if this is stock or if it might be causing my problem would be great! The service manual isn't anywhere online but if someone has a link that would be great too!

[madtheory]

I’ll take a look for the service manual. That capacitor looks fine to me. Highly unlikely to be the issue. A thorough diagnosis of the floppy is required. But as far as I remember it’s not essential. Not needed for boot, only for updates? For serious use/ not tearing your hair out, use SCSI. Very hifi machine with a nice filter and unpleasant UI.

[Cortinoias]

Nah, it's needed for boot, os isn't stored on board which from my experience with macintoshes is never good. It's like the drive is stuck or something, like it thinks there's already a disk in there, it blinks, and then blinks and clunks every few seconds when there's no disk inserted. I'll make a video and post a link later

[ItsMeOnly]

I assume this happens with OS disk inserted?
Because if it's a sequence of three head clicks, then a second of silence, and two clicks - this is not a proper OS disk.
The weirdness is normal, because the S2000 polls the drive every 4 secs in search of OS disk when it doesn't find the other/SCSI media.

[Cortinoias]

That's interesting, that might be it! The firmware chip on the board is v1.5 and the boot disk i have is 1.01 or something like that. Could that cause it? I have means to make a new boot disk so that would be no issue, I really hope that's it!

[ItsMeOnly]

late but with a clarification request: is that original disk, or did you make it yourself? Because older akais were very picky about both the media (you couldn't use DD as HD and vice versa) and the format (on linux you literally need to DD the image to disk).

[Cortinoias]

Here's the funny thing: the disks I have that came with it aren't os disks at all, they're akai pc software and for some reason I kept thinking the one that had a version number on it was a boot disk. I ordered one a while back, it'll be here today! I can't make one cause i don't have a windows 98 machine, I have an xp machine, and while it will run the exe, it doesn't write properly as others in the past have reported.

[salwa]

Just a sidenote - service manual for S2000 seems to be unobtainable. I've spent some time int the past looking for it - to no avail (I wanted to install internal JAZ drive, but couldn't figure out how to connect power). It seems weird (it was rather popular item in its day) but I've never found anyting on the web. Maybe something has changed recently and someone could point me to it?