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Since there's probably all of five of us who still use these this will likely go under the heading of useless information, nevertheless it may come in handy somewhere at some point.

You should be able to put in a fresh battery, point it at something bright (fast shutter speed) and crank off 5-6 shots bam-bam-bam.

If either of these give up "serverr" messages, which usually means the servo in the floppy drive, check the main battery with a voltmeter or try a fresh one. The batteries are NiCads (correct me if I am wrong) and they don't give reliable voltage when old or when they've developed a battery memory.

If it continues to give "serverr" or "cerr" messages (the floppy head is dirty) even when clean and checked, and behaves erratic, sometimes working, sometimes acting like the mirror is sticking, sometimes reading an empty floppy drive as full, put in a fresh lithium battery. It's the standard 2032 coin cell used as the CMOS battery in computer motherboards and they're available anywhere.

My MVC-5000 went through a series of recent fits until I replaced both batteries; as it is I'm going to check my older spare body and see if the problems I had with it reading the floppy weren't also battery related.

Well it looks like that wasn't it. After a brief episode of working okay I'm back to the same problem, which I think it a bad shutter or something with the mirror mechanism. The behavior is about the same as my D50 when it had a bad shutter; a few frames are shot fine, then it's hanging and feeling like it's sticking or unable to close. The floppy error messages are probably a misnomer as the floppy is likely waiting for an image to be written and it's not happening in time so it coughs up an error.

I have two parts bodies to work on, which is probably all that showed up on Ebay in the past year. If anyone has ideas or suggestions I'd appreciate it as documentation on these has been very hard to come by.

After many, many hours of testing and fiddling I've come to the following conclusions:

The floppy drive system is never 100% reliable, which was also the same when they were used in computers.

The 5000 is very sensitive to having good and fully charged batteries. The problem is--which I've also come across with the Canon Pro-70 and other cameras that use proprietary Ni-Cad and NiMH cells--that many of the batteries are new old stock that have been sitting around for years. This is especially true with the cheap Ebay ones In other words, you end up buying a new bad battery. Buy one that is known to be new and always charge it before use.

The video floppy discs can both be bad out of the box and go bad after use. This is again partly a consequence of how floppies are, but also because no one has made them in years and and they're all well beyond their expected service life. The only choice with these is just buy more off Ebay and mark the ones that give problems.

I found if it starts hanging or pausing to first try a freshly charged battery, and if it keeps giving a "Serv ERR" message to try a new floppy disc. I just went through two floppies that were "good" and it was click-click-click with no problems. However, I could pick it up again and start having problems-after all, these were semi-experimental even in the late 80's. Regardless, I think I have it working well enough to at least take it out and use it every once in awhile.

And lastly here it is in use as a regular camera:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set ... 5afe756585

Always fun to see people using these old things. Thanks for sharing.

Jarle