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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: amiga1260 on December 07, 2003, 11:04:29 AM
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The disk drive sometimes reads a disk correctly and sometimes not. I cleaned the disk drive, but it does not help. Does anyone has some other solutions? Except replacing it?
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Hi amiga 1260
clean it again and if it isn't enought, open it and try to clean the head, with isoprophil alcool and if you can, put a drop of silicon or ceramic (hard to find, expensive but the best) grease to the viewable gears.
To recalibrate a floppy deive, it is a hard job.
By the way . . .are you useing HD floppy disk?
Ciao
-edit-you can find the ceramic grease, in the "modellismo" (in italian) shop.
"modeling kits shops" . . .right?
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I only use dd disks.
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Hi amiga 1260
try a Searc on Aminet with: "floppy drive"
There are a lot ot FloppyDrive utilities, like:
TrackDiskSync.lha
I'm testing it myself :-) and an utility to use correctly, a CleaningDisk with GUI.
Ciao
PS- REALLY USEFUL UTILITIES :-)
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@amiga1260:
My A4000 diskdrive wouldnt work reliably. I tried cleaning it, but that didnt help - not strange though as it wasnt dirty at all. I tried make it work giving it some exercise with formatting and writing as much as possible to disks. The formatting almost always worked, but writing real data to the disk was the big problem, it would work to fill up half a disk but then it was stop. With this as background I figured that the diskdrive could read/write zeros (formatting), but had problems reading/writing ones which exists quite a lot in real data ;).
Anyhow, got the idea to exercise the drive writing only ones to disks without verifying, so I created an file of ADF-Size only containing ones and wrote that to the disk a couple of times and to my surprise the drive started working better!? Now, after some more exercise writing ADF-Images containing both only zeros and only ones written with both no-verify and verify, the drive works perfectly, so why not try this out as a last resort :).
Good luck!
/Patrik
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Hi patrik
all those activity, is called "cleaning heads, without a cleaning disk" :-)
Ciao
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@Framiga:
The strange thing is that as I wrote - I had cleaned the diskdrive with no success (cleaned the heads with alcohol). It didnt make the drive function one little bit better. Though when doing the diskdrive-exercising described, it showed results instantly.
/Patrik
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Hi patrick
yes . . .could be.
Ciao
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Is it possible to connect an A200 diskdrive to an A1200? because My A2000 only has kickstart 1.3, the program TrackDiskSync.lha needs kickstart 2.04.
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I believe the 1200 and 2000 use the same style of floppy drive (2000 drives are physically larger or something though)
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Hi amiga1260,
You may have a bad disk drive ribbon cable. Do NOT put any creases in that ribbon cable! If there are any creases in the disk drive ribbon cable, replace it with a new one. Also, make sure that you are NOT having ANY problems with your SCSI drives. Any problems with the SCSI system can cause the Amiga to get confused. This will then cause read / write failures from the 3.5" disk drives. You might also want to try replacing Paula. Not only is she responsible for producing the incredible stereo sounds and music that we hear, she also contains the microdisk controller. Be careful though, Paula is easily damaged by static electricity. :-D
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Paula and the CIA chips I recently had to switch in my Amiga... don't touch stuff while it's running ;)