A500 Floppy Disk Drive problems

[LaFey]

Greetings!

I just got back today my A500, after 10 years of absence from my house (long story)... After I cleaned him up I connected everything and found out the the internal floppy drive isn't working.

-It scans for disks;
-When I insert a disk it starts to read (or I hear something of a "try to read") and then stops suddenly - the image remains at the disk-in-hand logo; (I tried many different disks).

Any thoughts?

Should I remove the drive and clean it by hand? (I don't have any cleaning disk sets nor I think it would read it anyways...).
If I should clean it - what exactly should I clean? Will "common" pharmacy alcohol work on the heads?

[Overdoc]

If it had worked back then when you put the Amiga away, then it should just be a matter of dirty heads.

To clean them open up the Amiga, and remove the top case metal from the drive ( some drives have it simply stuck on the drive, others have it screwed on ). Aftre that you should see the bottom and top heads. Now take a tip and put it in alcohol ( normal pharmacy alcohol should be ok ) and carefully clean both heads with the tip. ( the heads are those small square, white things which look like ceramic )
Sometimes dirt can be very hard to get off from there, but you can easily see that and clean until both heads are ok.

[LaFey]

Thanks! I'll see to it! I'll keep you guys posted on developments-


EDIT:

Ok I did what you suggested. Now the drive starts to read the disk but stops soon afterwards on a CLI window claiming the disk is unreadable. The drive is making awful noises...

EDIT 2:

I opened up the computer again and gave it a second try. It now read disk but claims there are errors. I couldn't read Workbench 1.3... Fortunately I found out a disk that had a copier (by sheer luck - it was marked Power Drift but had bundled a Copier...) and I was able to copy WB and Extras to new disks - I set the retry to 20 times... It seems that any disk is progressively better read each time I check it with the copier - normally I have some bad sectors on the first read - but afterwards it gets fine (although it make more noise towards the end of the floppy sectors.)

Do you think I need to re-align the floppy heads? Thanks.

It definately sounds like a disk read error caused by a dirty or miss-aligned head.

You may find that after a lot of cleaning it works or alternatively you may have to scour the net for a replacement.

[Miggy2TheMax]

Could be a couple of reasons, the disks you tried reading while the head was really dusty and dirty are now dirty themselves. After retrying many times it probably works because the dust that was there before is getting cleaned by the head ( just a theory why you disks could be coming good )

As for your drive getting noisy towards the end of the disk... does it do that on all disks?

don't know about re-aligning you heads.

[Overdoc]

Well, could be slightly misaligned. If ther track-0 sensor is slightly out of alignment then you will notice that on the outer tracks first.
But could also just be dirt on the head/disks, or maybe also the rails where the r/w head moves along could use a little bit of grease ?
Realigning is possible ( have done that a number of times ), but it's not an easy task ! Try searching the board here for align or calibrate or something like that and you can find a thread where I basically explained how to do it.
Btw, from which manufacturer is your drive made from ?