Fooling with floppy drives

From: SUPRDAVE_at_aol.com <(SUPRDAVE_at_aol.com)>
Date: Thu Apr 8 15:11:54 1999

In a message dated 08/04/99 15:36:36 Eastern Daylight Time,
mikeford_at_netwiz.net writes:

<< When you say not reading, is it;
 
 Fails to spin at all, so all discs are immediately rejected?
 
 Doesn't reliably read? My wet cleaning floppy often helps this case.
 
 I have a few diagnostic programs, and I think it is TechTool Pro that will
 do a full drive test, with a 0% to 100% rating that fairly accurately ranks
 condition of drives. A few of the refurb places sell drives using this
 rating, with a 90%+ drive fetching a 100% premium over just a working drive.
>>

well, my mac IIcx had a drive that wouldnot eject disks. the grease had
gummed up so i used an aerosol cleaning product and cleaned all that out and
used moly grease to fix the stickiness. i also ran a head cleaning disk in
the drive for several minutes and amazingly got the drive reading disks
again. my IIx will spit disks out ok but refuses to read known good mac
formatted floppies. that was cleaned with a head cleaning disk as well but no
improvement. unfortunately, the IIx only has one drive instead of two. I
recently got a IIci (nice machine!) and it works great, but there seems to be
a drive alignment problem. disks formatted on the cx wont always read right
on the IIci. seems that i have to use one external floppy between both macs
in order to get 800k disks to be read reliably. grrr.
Received on Thu Apr 08 1999 - 15:11:54 BST