Korg Forums

[martinpoole]

Hello everybody! My name is Martin, I live in Bristol in the UK. I have owned my 01wfd from new since 1992 and it has had heavy use on stage ever since. The poor thing has been rebuilt many times but I wouldn't change it for the world. However, recently the disk drive died on me. My local repair guru was unable to help, so being a practical sort of guy (I'm a carpenter by day!) I ripped the back off to have a look.

The first thing I did was to remove the old drive from the keyboard. Thinking that it was a standard floppy drive (it looked like one), I robbed one out of an old PC and put it in. Of course, it didn't work, not even power up. A bit of research later taught me that it had to be 720k and nothing else would do.

The problem with requiring a 720k disc drive unit is that everybody threw them away when 1.44 came in. There are just none around, so I looked on E-bay and found one out of an old Atari ST for sale £9.99+pp, a couple of days later and it was mine!

I excitedly installed it into my 01wfd and guess what? It didn't work! BUT, it did power up and it recognised the sound names from the factory preset disc. It wanted to work and I wasn't going to give up now. So using my carpenters logic I took the multipin ribbon thing out the back of the disc drive looked at it and thought,"What if I turned the multipin connector upside down and plugged it in?" Trouble is it will only go in one way. Out came the Stanley knife and I hacked off the lugs so that I could plug it in upside down. With absolutely nothing to lose, I plugged it in, fired it up and promptly ran away and hid behind the sofa just in case. After a quick change of underpants I returned only to find that [b]it works perfectly!!![/b]

I hope that this might help some poor soul with a dodgy disc drive. I think the moral of my story is that, if you want to repair your own keyboard, enrol on a carpentry course at your local college. Cheers!

Martin