Hello - strange behavior when loading

[Ale555]

Hello everybody, my x68k started doing this strange thing when loading.
The screen flashes everytime I hear the floppy drive loading or accessing the floppy, even when I put it in.
No flashing when accessing the HDD.
What could it be? PSU has been serviced... is it already failing?
The system works perfectly btw - good image on tv using Micomsoft XPC-4, good sound on a SC-55 setup, good response to both keyboard and joypad, and both FDD's never failed reading a floppy.

[Dal]

I suggest replacing all the electrolytic capacitors. There's plenty of info about this in the wiki.

[Ale555]

Thank you for the reply. You mean replacing every capacitor or just those in the floppy drives? I will need someone to do it by the way, since I have no ability in those kind of things...

[Dal]

Capacitors go dry over time - a lot of 20-30 year old hardware is failing for this very reason. As a collector, I'm spending a lot of my time reconditioning my machines. If you're going to own this stuff, I think it's worth knowing how to keep them maintained.

You could replace the ones around the floppy drives and the big 2200mf on the motherboard as a minimum and there's a reasonable chance this fault will disappear however you'll likely encounter other faults as the other capacitors start to go dry.

I recently recapped my dead ACE and brought it back to life. It's a big job (took most of a day) but at least it's good for another 30+ years.

[Ale555]

Ok, I understand, thank you again!

[Ale555]

Hello, here I am after a while. I managed recapping the PSU (thanks to a friend), but it still has the flickering when accessing the FDD's. Meanwhile I managed to build an external compactflash hdd and I have no issue when loading with that.
Any idea?

[famiac]

Ideally you should recap the entire computer, including daughterboard

[Ale555]

Wow... I'll see what to do since I wanted to get a XVI... thank you so much!!