What's happening to my floppy drives?

[hayashi]

OK, I've now managed to put a grand total of 4 Amiga floppy drives out of action with bad disks. I should have really learned my lesson by now, but no, I'm an idiot and I apologise for the time I'm wasting here.

I know that the floppy drives are being killed by physically defective disks (I think this time I killed it trying to check it for not being physically defective), and the result is a horrific scraping noise, followed by the disk spouting read errors, then "not a valid DOS disk" errors, then not reading at all.

Does anyone else know anything more about this? Also, feel free to yell at me or whatever for being probably the most negligent Amiga owner in the universe. =(

[taunusand]

Buy a new drive from Amigakit.com or Vesalia.de
Or try to clean the drive head.

AND THROW AWAY THE BAD DISKS :roll:

[hayashi]

OK, in a cruel twist of fate, I ordered another floppy drive with borrowed money, only to find that the next time I turned the Amiga on the drive WORKED PERFECTLY.

._.

Still, I've managed to kill 3 other drives with bad disks... though seeing what just happened the problem may be completely rectifiable, in which case I've now wasted £27 on new drives. =(

And don't worry, I won't be using any of those disks again

[taunusand]

It's strange. I've newer managed to kill any drive with a bad disk.
And I have thrown away a lot of disks with strange noises and bad blocks :-P

[CLS2086]

Don't clean the head.
Clean the head displacement system (long screw and motor).

[orb85750]

taunusand wrote:
It's strange. I've newer managed to kill any drive with a bad disk.
And I have thrown away a lot of disks with strange noises and bad blocks :-P

I'll second that.  I've used disks so bad that I felt stupid putting them in my drive, but fortunately the drive survived.

[zipper]

Couldn't kill a drive even when playing "head music" - but not too long as it felt frightening.

[Daedalus]

It depends on the nature of the defect whether a floppy drive will be killed or not. Most bad disks are caused by degradation of the surface, and at worst that just means the surface coating sticks to the heads, making them useless. However cleaning them should solve that one. To actually break a drive there must've been something else wrong with the disk - a ridge in the media itself which knocked the head out of alignment or something.

Don't worry, at this stage it's always wise to have a spare drive nearby :-)

[Ruud]

Both myself and a friend managed to kill the drives on our A500's back in the day.  The disk that killed my drive was one that'd come back to me after having been on loan to another friend. Goodness knows what he'd done to it to turn it into a KILLER disk!    :lol:

[Speelgoedmannetje]

hayashi wrote:
I know that the floppy drives are being killed by physically defective disks (I think this time I killed it trying to check it for not being physically defective), and the result is a horrific scraping noise, followed by the disk spouting read errors, then "not a valid DOS disk" errors, then not reading at all.

Are you familiar with Amiga?
You should know that if a disk is NDOS, it's probably a game disk which you can boot from.

[CountRaven]

All of my Amiga drives work fine but the most of them make this "grrr" little noise for a few seconds just after I press the eject button to remove out a disk? Is it something that I have to worry about?

[hayashi]

It displays the error while trying to boot from the disk, too. Also, my floppy drives also make a tiny grr after ejecting a disk, though it doesn't last for more than a second.