A500+ 7 faulty floppy drives? 1 working?

[IlyaZ]

Hi,

I used to use A500+ in the 90ies as a kid. Basic user, mostly games and stuff. 10 years ago I inherited a lot of commodore hardware from an advanced user. Now I got around to restoring my old setup and to sell off surplus parts since space is more of an issue.

The floppy drives of my old A500+ began to fail already more than 20 years ago, but now none of them work, including the internal drive. The internal recognizes a disk and begins to read but I get sent back to kickstart main screen. Some external drives recognize the disk and begin to read, but then take forever to load. My other A500+ luckily has a working internal unit, and cross testing of floppy drives returns the same result there.

Is this a repairable condition?

[F0LLETT]

Hi,

I used to use A500+ in the 90ies as a kid. Basic user, mostly games and stuff. 10 years ago I inherited a lot of commodore hardware from an advanced user. Now I got around to restoring my old setup and to sell off surplus parts since space is more of an issue.

The floppy drives of my old A500+ began to fail already more than 20 years ago, but now none of them work, including the internal drive. The internal recognizes a disk and begins to read but I get sent back to kickstart main screen. Some external drives recognize the disk and begin to read, but then take forever to load. My other A500+ luckily has a working internal unit, and cross testing of floppy drives returns the same result there.

Is this a repairable condition?

First thing to try on any A500, is remove all socketed chips carefully and reseat them.
In my experience, it solved 99% of issues.

Also as its a +, hope you have removed the battery,as they leak bad and destroy stuff.

[IlyaZ]

I might try that. You think it could be an issue with the A500+ itself and not the individual drives?

Yes, I need to remove the batteries. Only consequence is that it won't keep track of time?

[F0LLETT]

I might try that. You think it could be an issue with the A500+ itself and not the individual drives?

Yes, I need to remove the batteries. Only consequence is that it won't keep track of time?

7 all with same fault, theres your answer there.

Yes, you will lose time. If it hasnt already you could also loose some track.

[IlyaZ]

I understand there are plenty of socketed chips on the mainboard of the A500+, but just to be clear, the socketed chips you mention, are they located on the disk drives themselves?

[F0LLETT]

I understand there are plenty of socketed chips on the mainboard of the A500+, but just to be clear, the socketed chips you mention, are they located on the disk drives themselves?

No. All the sockected chips in the A500.

[IlyaZ]

If I reseat them and it works, wouldn't that imply that the problem is with the A500-unit(s) and that the 7 faulty drives are fine?

[F0LLETT]

If I reseat them and it works, wouldn't that imply that the problem is with the A500-unit(s) and that the 7 faulty drives are fine?

Yes.