Hey Paul,
Thanks for your comments! Our 38 is actually a fairly late machine - it was manufacrured in late 1987, less than a year before the AS/400 was announced, and was in use well into 1990. It has one internal 62PC drive and an external 9332-400 drive. I believe (and I hope) that it was configured the way you mentioned, which was best practice for the time - 62PC just used for microcode, and the external DASD for the OS. We had the 38 for most of a year before the external DASD was located, so there wasn't much hope for recovery until recently. We do have a bad spindle motor on the 62PC, I have voltage going into it but not skinny coming out of it, so that replacement will happen soon and we should be able to IPL. I can read diskettes from the 72MD so thats spindle motor is good. I've replaced (and re-bearinged) a lot of those back in the day. Joe > On Jun 23, 2026, at 9:13 AM, Paul Berger via cctalk <[email protected]> > wrote: > > You may want to look around inside for seized fans. S/38s typically ran 7/24 > and when turned off one or more fans would fail to start when the system was > restarted. Another thing to check would be the motor on the on the 72MD > diskette drive. My experience when servicing S/38 was whenever I wanted to > run diagnostics from diskettes I would first have to free up or replace the > motor. Like a usual 8" diskette drive the spindle motor is an AC motor that > is powered whenever the system is turned on. Most customers rarely used the > diskette drive so did not notice it was seized. > > My recollection is the logic in the systems is solid, perhaps the weakest > part is the 62PC (Piccolo) disk unit inside that stored the systems > microcode. Most customers isolated it from the storage pool so they would not > have to reload the entire system when it packed it in. > > What do you have for storage on the system? Originally the systems supported > multiple 62PCs inside or 3370s (the controller is not the same as the one > used on 370s) Later there was an option offered to support attachment of > 9332 or 9335 disks. The 9332 200 and 400 are probably the most robust of the > lot. > > Paul. > > On 2026-06-22 20:53, Joe George via cctalk wrote: >> We've been working on restoring and powering up a fairly rare bird of IBM >> Midrange machine, the IBM System/38. >> >> We had some good success this past weekend that I'd like to share. >> >> https://crusty.computer/?p=89 >> June Work Recap: Edith – The Crusty Computer Club >> crusty.computer >> >> >> tl;dr: she powered up and no smoke came out and no sparks came out! There >> are several repairs needed but they are known and fixable.
