Fixing floppy drive

[Sim085]

Hello, I got this floppy drive. When I connected it first time it did not want to load anything. Just stayed in the enter disk screen.

After watching some videos on you tube I opened the floppy drive and cleaned it a little. When I tried again the disks now boot and some load something up to a stage but then I get the the error:

"System Request" - "Error Validating Disk" - "Disk is unreadable"

Does anyone know what the problem might be? Should I check anything in particular?

Edit: Just some extra info, this is an Chinon A500 floppy drive. The A500 has Kickstart 1.3.

[Jope]

Could be, that the head carriage isn't moving well on its rail. You can use a drop of bike chain oil or silicone oil on a q-tip and then wipe the rail with the oiled q-tip.

[Sim085]

Thanks for the suggestion, I put bike oil on the motor shaft and the rod on which the head moves. It is now much better. I got the disks to load so that is great. However I now get some checksum errors, but not always the same.

For example I tried with a known to work Workbench 1.3 disk. Once it gave it a checksum error on load, another time it loaded and gave me a checksum error when opening a window and yet another time was a checksum error on load.

Originally Posted by Jope

Could be, that the head carriage isn't moving well on its rail. You can use a drop of bike chain oil or silicone oil on a q-tip and then wipe the rail with the oiled q-tip.

[Sim085]

So I cleaned the head with surgical spirit and Workbench 1.3 now loaded without any issue and even when I open applications looks ok.

However when I inserted a bad disk it started to give trouble again even with same Workbench disk which had loaded fine a couple of times before.

What could be leading to this behavior?

To get it working again I had to re-open and polish the head. Is it just the head or could be capacitor related?

[Jope]

The bad disk probably contaminates the head. Copy its contents to a working disk and discard the bad one?

[Sim085]

By contamination you mean some fungal (I read somewhere about this) or dust? I am not so keen about the disks themselves really, but just want to confirm if this is really the issue.

Originally Posted by Jope

The bad disk probably contaminates the head. Copy its contents to a working disk and discard the bad one?

[Jope]

Either foreign contaminants that come off (mildew, dust) or the magnetic material has softened and gets scraped off the disk by the head.

[Sim085]

Hello, one floppy disk fixed and working great. I now have another one. This one when I insert a disk clicks, tries to load (I hear two clicks) and then nothing, just shows start up screen again.

Does anyone know what problem might be?

From what I can see both the motor that moves the head and the one which rotors the disk work. I put oil on the head motor and cleaned head.

Is there anything else I could check?

[idrougge]

Do you think the disk should be bootable to begin with?

[Sim085]

Yes I am sure of that, same disk boots on another disk drive.

Originally Posted by idrougge

Do you think the disk should be bootable to begin with?

I think this particular drive had passed through some trauma. By watching videos on youtube I found out the following tool;

http://aminet.net/package/driver/media/DriveTest

This allows me to move the head up and down. What I did notice is that the main shaft attached to the back motor seems to move slightly to the left and to right on some of the moves.

Is this normal?

Will try to take a video.