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WTB or Trade for a Tested READ/WRITE 5.25 Floppy Drive and Controller for Apple IIe

J

Junk Junkie

Member
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
30
Location
East Tennessee
I have an apple IIe enhanced with stock I/O drive controller. I've tried four different drives and all read poorly and none would write or format a single disk. I'm inclined to believe that my controller may be faulty. If you have a tested working drive and controller to sell or trade I am very interested. Prefer to trade. I have lots of items a vintage computer collector might be interested.



Gary Fletcher
 
Have you tried cleaning the drive heads?
Clean/lube the rails and/or head positioner?
 
Hi,
I have some of both. But I do not think that is the problem with 4 drives. Yes clean the heads on the drives. Head cleaning disk with Isopropyl Alcohol. Old disks even new old disks can foul up a head until you read all the tracks. Next would be the speed test. With Copy II+ and blank disk for the speed test. Need the blank to write to and read for the speed test. Easy to adjust, with a jewelers screw driver.

Next it would be the disk controller card. TURN POWER off Pull out card. Reseat all the chips by setting down the card and pushing down on chips. They will make a scrunch sound if they were out a bit and are now reseated.

Next would be cleaning the edge connector on the card. I prefer to use an old white cotton T-Shirt rag. Take and rub on the edge connector. Each side. A little pressure is OK. You will notice it leaves a dark streak. Then if you do it again. It will be lighter each time. Until about the 3-4 time where you hardly be able to see
 
Geo3 said:
Yes clean the heads on the drives.
Click to expand...
This is the best advice you can get. You can't imagine how easy it is for an old diskette to foul a drive. Yes, it depends on the diskette's condition. But, if you've got one (and it only takes one to foul many drives) that is prone to do this cleaning the heads may revive the drives so that they now work perfectly. Believe me, I've gone through a stack of what I thought were dead floppy drives, cleaned their heads, and found that about half of them now work just fine. And they continue to do so until a suspect diskette is once again introduced to them.
 
Clean is the only way to go.. Ive resurrected dirty nasty Disk II's like that, they worked like a charm after, pop em apart and clean everything you can, If you need a Disk controller, got tons of spares for 15 shipped

Steve
 
Frank G.,

Thanks for the head up. I did check out the link and I bought one. If a new drive doesn't work it might just be my controller.



Gary Fletcher
 
Steve,

I've taken all the drives apart, cleaned the heads, the rails and anything else that had a spot of dirt on it. After the cleaning the drives seemed to perform a little better, but I've not found a single drive that would write or format. I should say that I'm using brand new floppy disks too, out of a sealed box.



Gary Fletcher
 
Stone,

I am using brand new disks from a sealed box. I've also taken the drives apart and cleaned them. Just havn't had any real luck yet.



Gary Fletcher
 
Geo3,

I've done everything you've suggested except for the speed test with Copy II+. I should say that I have to boot this computer with ADTPro boot strap is the only way I can get it to boot. From there I've tried several times and 4 different drives to create new boot disks for it. Sometimes the format process will complete without errors, but the disk simply will not boot. The drives do spin, but have trouble seeking.



Gary Fletcher
 
Gary, have you tried a known, good disk in any of the drives? Is it possible that your sealed box of disks is a box of old disks that you just opened? Disks can get old from age alone and then foul a drive. If this is the case, clean the drive with a cleaning diskette and liquid then put a known good disk into it. See how it reads, do a disk test. If it works fine then throw your box of recently opened diskettes away and start over with something else.
 
Yes you need to test it with know disks that work. Then you can do the speed test on it. Adjust the speed thur the little hole near the front rubber foot. It does not take much to change the speed. Speeds on these tend to creep up over the years. With CopyII+ you want to shoot for 199.5+ . Slightly slower speeds than 200 seem to read everything better.

Did you clean the edge connector on the card?

I have some disk controller cards as well for $10. with the DB19 pig tale and some that take the 20pin flat ribbon cable for the disk drive IIs. The ones with a metal case. NOW these tend to go out of alignment more of

You might also TURN the POWER OFF and Push down on all the chips on the main Mother board as well.
 
Thanks to everyone for their advice and reccomendations. After many hours of cleaning, lubricating and checking the drive speed with no luck, Geo3 mentioned that I should be using DD/DS Floppies. I wasn't. I was using DS/HD disks. I think somewhere I knew that these drives liked the double density variety, but I thought if you reformat a high density disk it wouldn't matter. I guess I was wrong. I managed to find a few old DD/DS disks in my stash and they all formatted perfectly. So what I thought had to be a harware problem actually came down to a disk problem.



Gary Fletcher
 
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