Fooling with floppy drives

From: Mike Ford <mikeford_at_netwiz.net>
Date: Fri Apr 9 02:23:54 1999

>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.

Classic examples, the little gear and cam mechanism of the eject cycle gets
funky, and if not cleaned burns out the motor. I stopped in a electronics
place today, and the $12.75 price of a can of cleaner was too much sticker
shock (maybe Fry's will be cheaper).

With the IIx my only guess is that the heads are out of alignment (top to
bottom head I think). I have no clue how this gets fixed.

My plan right now is to first buy some more drives, then sit down with a
batch and rubber gloves and clean and relube all of them at once. In fact I
may seek out a box of "bad" floppies to add to my repair run next time I
see them at the swap meet. Fortunately I just opened up a IIfx from a
friendly trade and found two excellent condition drives (along with some
giant double sized 8 MB simms).
Received on Fri Apr 09 1999 - 02:23:54 BST