A2000 disk drives concerns

[SimonCD32]

Hello all you helpful people out there!

So this A2000 I've brought, I have concerns over the disk drives. They seem incredibly temperamental and only work half the time. Also many disks they cannot read at all and just make horrible scratching noises and crashes every time. Also the lights on the disk drives are always Red rather than Green, is this normal?

Any idea of what I can do to fix the problem?

Thanks so much, as always, for any help.

Simon

[mark_k]

The activity LEDs are usually red. You could try cleaning the drive heads. Can you format and write to a blank disk (preferably a new one)?

Probably not a good idea to test with any disks which contain data you care about until you've confirmed the drive is working properly. It's possible that the drive head is scratching the surface of disks you insert in it at the moment.

[ajk]

The drive head movement mechanism may be in need of cleaning and re-lubing. If you open up the outer case there is a little assembly with a spiral shaft, it's often covered in dry black grease and dust. Cleaning all of that away and adding a small dab of fresh lubricant usually helps with the noise a lot. Of course there may be other problems as well.

[Jope]

+1 for lubricating the rails for the head carriage. Other problems: oxidization in the switches that detect write protect and disk insertion.

[Daedalus]

Yep, I recently bought an A2000 that was listed for parts. Floppy drive gave all appearances of being dead, but once the switches were prodded a little and the heads freed up and cleaned, it started working fine again. There was a layer of crust around the lead screw and slides consisting of what looked like old grease combined with 20 years of dust, tar and nicotine. Pretty disgusting, but it's a happy (and fully working) A2000 now!

[Jope]

Seems the big boxes are more prone to gumming up, as the power supplies in those suck air through the drives. All the dust goes in and the head carriage guide rail dries up. :-)