Cleaning A500 DISK DRIVE

[zonaps2]

My disk drive sometimes doesn't work, It tries to read but fails sometimes, the I just blow into the unit and it works again.
I have a old cleaning diskette in great condition but missing the liquid that come with it. What can I use? Isopropylic alcohol would be fine?

Thanks.

[AmigaMance]

 I have use plain alchohol or methanol in the past. I don't know how good they were in cleaning the heads but i know that it didn't do any harm to my drive.
 I had the same symptoms with yours and later on i found that it was the drive's cable not the drive. So, you might want to check this one too.

[zonaps2]

Ok, I'll check the cable.
Thanks

[murple]

Never seen it on a floppy, but I have seen many SCSI problems caused due to damaged ribbon cables.

[Bamiga2002]

You might want to use HeadCleaner for the cleaning process.

[zonaps2]

Thanks for replying.
How do I use that head cleaner program?
what kind of file is .lha?
I need to burn it to an Amiga disk?

Thanks

[rkauer]

zonaps2 wrote:
Thanks for replying.
How do I use that head cleaner program?

Simply put the disk cleaner in the drive and run the program for no more than 45s.

what kind of file is .lha?

 Lha is the Amiga equivalent to .zip in peecees or .hqx in Macs.

I need to burn it to an Amiga disk?

 If you don't have a hd, then yes, you need to unpack the content of the .lha to a disk with capacity to store it.

Thanks

 You're wellcome. ;-)

[meega]

The read/write head is essentially a tape-head, so normal cassette-deck cleaning fluid - which is usually isopropyl alcohol (or pure ethanol, if you have a source) should be fine. Don't put loads onto the fibre disk though, it should not be saturated - because then you have to wait quite a while for it to evaporate from the insides of the drive. Just a few drops on a small area of the disk is enough. The cleaning disk can be used quite a few times, as you only need to wet a small stripe or two to ensure that the head gets wiped a few times. I only have one cleaning disk, I've had it for about fifteen years, and I've only used it three or four times.

Aside: I stick an 850W vacuum with its smallest "slot" nozzle at the opening as a routine method of cleaning really dirty (dusty/hairy) drives. No problems as long as nothing inside is loose. Quite often the cause of bad reading is that there is a cat or dog hair in there, but most often the cause is a bad floppy disk and no amount of drive-cleaning can fix that - the cure is to use a better floppy. I also routinely use said vacuum technique for cleaning motherboards and the inside of computer cases. Be careful and you should have no problems - but don't come crying to me if anything goes wrong, I have never caused any damage at all by vacuuming my computers.

Computer cleaner:

[TjLaZer]

what kind of file is .lha?

You really are an Amiga n00b huh?  LHA is an archiver like zip.

[zonaps2]

@TjLaZer

I own an A500 since 1990, but never had a HD, so I guess that's why I'm not familiar with Amiga extension files.

Thanks for advices :-)

But I'm not understand how to unpack the .lha to an amiga floppy.
Do I have to unpack using my pc disk drive and that's all?
I mean, the disk must be amiga formatted right?
Pc will be able to write an amiga floppy?
and Amiga will be able to read it?

Sorry but I don't get it!

Thanks

[TjLaZer]

First things first:  PC cannot read Amiga disks, Amiga (of course) can read PC disks!  

LHA should be copied to your C folder on your Workbench disk or partition since it is a command line driven program.

In a shell you use the command to unarc the archive.

Use the command "LHA ?" to see the help instructions on how to use the command.  You will then be able to unarchive the LHA file to a formatted floppy disk for use. (on the Amiga of course)

Alternatively if you have WinRAR you could unarchive the files to a 720k PC formatted disk, then read the disk on your Amiga with CrossDOS but that would be more difficult for a novice user /me thinks!

[zonaps2]

Ok, I'll try that.
Thanks

[rkauer]

TjLaZer wrote:
First things first:  PC cannot read Amiga disks, Amiga (of course) can read PC disks!  

 Only if the pc disk is 720k formated, BTW.

LHA should be copied to your C folder on your Workbench disk or partition since it is a command line driven program.

 Download lha.run from aminet. Note: run it in Amiga RAM-disk, then save the correct executable to your C: drawer. Don't use version above 1.38, no gain for plain A500's users.

 Note @TJ says the executable, not the lha archive must be in the C: drawer.:-)

In a shell you use the command to unarc the archive.

 "Normal" use: Lha -x archivename.lha

Use the command "LHA ?" to see the help instructions on how to use the command.  You will then be able to unarchive the LHA file to a formatted floppy disk for use. (on the Amiga of course)

Most recent version of lha don't  need to put "?"  after the command. Simply type "lha", enter and the help will come.

Alternatively if you have WinRAR you could unarchive the files to a 720k PC formatted disk, then read the disk on your Amiga with CrossDOS but that would be more difficult for a novice user /me thinks!

 Don't even think about this! PC's will destroy the Amiga special flags in some depacked archives. And DOS disks will truncate the archive names to 8.3 format. The better solution is ALWAYS depack the .lha archive in the Amiga.