Ensoniq ASR X-PRO Invalid OS

I have an ASR X-PRO that upon power up gives the error “invalid OS please reload” I have an OS disk in the floppy drive. I can hear that the drive is doing something, tho doesn’t sound quite right. I assume that my drive is bad? I can’t use just any ole floppy drive either correct? I can’t seem to find a reset or anything like that for the asr either.

I would appreciate any advice given!

Think I’ll do any damage trying a floppy drive I have laying around or should I buy the one from Syntaur thats a direct replacement?

Are you sure the floppy disk itself is good? If you have a computer with a disk drive, you should be able to read the disk and see the OS file in the directory. If you are able to do that, then it is likely the drive itself is faulty.

We sometimes have luck just blowing out the dust of a drive - sometimes they collect quite a mess of dust on the inside, and that can prevent the drive head from reading correctly. A can of compressed air is ideal - just hold the flap of the drive open, and give a blast in there. You can also blow with your mouth, just don’t spit into there!

If that doesn’t work, then replacing the drive is the next step. Earlier Ensoniq products were extremely picky about needing the exact model of floppy drive; I think the ASR-X is more forgiving, but not every drive will work. In any case, installing an incorrect drive won’t damage anything - it just won’t work correctly.

A couple of tips on swapping drives:

If the drive light stays on constantly, you probably have the ribbon cable installed upside down. Flip it over, and that will usually resolve that problem.

The best way to test a drive, to see if it works fully, is to format a disk. This causes the drive to write to every sector on the disk, and then read every sector to verify it, so it’s a pretty complete workout.

Sam, Thank you very much for the reply! I am going to try and get an old XP machine fired up and see what I can find on the disk. It was purchased by someone else off ebay, so it’s likely that could be my problem. I appreciate the advice on the floppy drive. Love the youtube show btw!