My A500 is dying bit by bit :(

[Old Fool]

My latest problem with my A500 is that it has become picky what comes to loading games. For example Skidmarks's track disk 2 crashes while my second A500 loads it fine. It's an original disk without no track errors or such.

My plan is to create one single fully working machine. The one with the difficulties to load certain games have no other flaws. The second A500 has only partly working keyboard and a disk drive that sometimes won't load.

Well I must also sound-proof my working disk drive because its very noisy!

[orange]

that's not such a big problem, its probably just the floppy drive. try to clean it. or make a backup copy of game and load that.
usually the heads get misaligned, so the drive reads only what it writes

[Old Fool]

Originally Posted by orange

that's not such a big problem, its probably just the floppy drive. try to clean it. or make a backup copy of game and load that.
usually the heads get misaligned, so the drive reads only what it writes

I've been using head cleaning diskettes with only a little or no result at all. Actually the disk drive sometimes loads even if no disk is inserted. After this it won't load again at all. This is very nice when it happens in the middle of disk swapping in a game that loads automatically. That's why I like more disk swapping that is based on a "hit key or fire button to continue".

[orange]

aha, that indicates the problem is in the 'disk inserted' sensor.
there are two similar sensors, both near the slot;
one is used to detect 'write protected', you need to check the other one.
I'd pour some contact cleaner/alcohol inside (while pressed) and push it couple of times.
(if you want to avoid dismantling everything)
just don't forget waiting for cleaner to evaporate completely.

its a small (but common) problem, really.