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Teac FD-55GFR-142-U - wont format

H

Haemogoblin

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 22, 2011
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233
Location
Sheffield, England
I'm not sure if this is the right place to post. But as some of you guys know, i'm trying to get my 286 Sharp working.

So to make myself some boot disks ect, i bought a teac fd-55gfr-142-u 5.25" 1.22mb floppy drive.

The bios has been told what it is, but when i try formatting a 1.22mb floppy it crashes explorer. When i use CMD and the lame excuse for dos, i get an invalid media - track 0 bad.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

I've cleaned the drive heads with a swap, but thats changed nothing.
 
I've not very up on how to identify 5.25" floppies, but i believe i have a mix of used 360 and 1.2 floppy. Some have a square knot cut out one side, some have it both sides, one doesn't have one at all. All are unreable by the drive.

I did get one with two notch's to format at 360k, then after it wouldn't read it and said it was unformatted. :-/
 
Chuck - i'm best of taking a photo, as i'm really struggling to understand it. Needless to say one jumper is on DC-1 or DS-1, which means the drive has to be connected about the twist in the wire.
 
Okay, 360K floppies (except for the very oldest) usually have a reinforcing ring around the hub hole; almost no 1.2MB floppies do. The disks with a notch cut out on both sides are "flippies" mostly meant for non-IBM (e.g. Apple II) systems (single-sided drives where you can flip the disk over to get another side of data).

Without the notch, you'll get a write-protect error--the notch is necessary to be able to write on the floppy. Notchless disks usually were used as distribution media by software vendors (you can't clobber the floppy).
 
Ok, then all of these are 1.2 floppies. As they dont have any reinforced ring around the inner hole.

Here is the pin settings



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Win7 in CMD tries to format them all at 160kb, unless i specify a different size. Only managed to format one disk at 360kb and well that didn't work out well
 
Haemogoblin said:
Ok, then all of these are 1.2 floppies. As they dont have any reinforced ring around the inner hole.

Win7 in CMD tries to format them all at 160kb, unless i specify a different size. Only managed to format one disk at 360kb and well that didn't work out well
Click to expand...

You can't format a 1.2mb disk to 360k - the media is just too different. Also, there is no way for the disk drive to know the difference between the media capacities, since there is no physical difference in the disk (like the extra hole on HD 3.5" media). Try formatting to 1.2mb - and be sure the BIOS knows you have a 1.2mb drive installed - the data rate is different, so it's important that you configure it properly.

Also, just a note - after you've been working with floppies for a while, you'll be able to tell 1.2mb media by looking at it, the disk surface is a slightly darker color, and shinier.

-Ian
 
Haemogoblin said:
Ok, then all of these are 1.2 floppies. As they dont have any reinforced ring around the inner hole.
Click to expand...

I really doubt that this is the case for the "flippies". This is a 360K floppy; note the ring around the hub (sometimes it's white):

capture64.jpg


This is a 1.2MB floppy; note that there's no ring of any sort:

5093142955_b67c5f34ae.jpg


If a disk makes noises (e.g. high-pitched squealing) when in a drive, throw the floppy away and clean the drive heads with a soft cotton swab and some isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol. Brands such as "Wabash" and "Datamaster" are notorious for this kind of behavior. They're shedding the oxide coating right onto the drive heads.

BTW, the drive jumpers look fine for PC use.
 
Hi Ian

As i wrote in my initial post, the bios is set to 1.2mb 5.25" floppy. I was trying to format the disks with various settings, in the hope of possibly hitting lucky :)

I'm using the command "format a: /f:1.2"

If there's a better way, i'm definitely all ears :-D
 
OK well mine look like the latter, one i just picked up actually has "ibm pc and compatible, preformatted" written on it.

I've had one squeel already, but that was before i used the swap to clean the head.

This batch came as a job lot of used floppies, i was hoping least some would work :-/
 
Ok, this drive is definitely not working correctly. I've just put the one disk that i know for sure DOES work, which is the only disk i have for the Sharp. And my main pc told me it wasn't formatted.
 
I also hope that the disks say "high density" or some such.

5.25" floppies are generally pretty reliable (more so than 3.5" HD floppies at any rate). And the Teac drive is a very good one.

I suspect that the drive heads may still not be really clean. A 50-50 mixture of acetone and isopropanol may be better, but keep it away from plastic. Or trot over to your local auto parts supply place and see if they have any brake cleaner and (carefully) try that.
 
I've cleaned the heads and managed to get it to read one or two of the 32 disks i bought. I've another batch of NEW disks on it's way, so hopefully monday/tuesday i'll know for sure what the deal is.

I never expected it to be this hard to get a ruddy floppy drive to work. I'm half tempted to fit a 3.5" floppy drive in the sharp and have done with it, as i'll soon be pulling out my hair lol


***UPDATE***

Looks like i'm now officially off down the river without a paddle *sigh* The disk that i got with the Sharp, which was the only boot disk i had, no longer works after being placed inside the TEAC drive.

I now have no means to do anything with the 7200, aside from using it as an over sized paper weight. I can only guess the TEAC IS as i originally suspected, buggered. Otherwise, i can't see why a floppy drive would molest a disk thats been inserted purely for the purposes of reading the contents.

Patience level = Currently chewing the sofa
 
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