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New 5.25 inch floppy drive 1.2MB doesnt work anymore..

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Robin4

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Sep 25, 2011
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I had bought a NEW canon 5.25 inch 1.2MB floppy drive few days ago..
Today it arrived and hoping that the drive was working.. It came in the orginal antistatic bag with the cardboard in this drive..

I installed this drive in my computer and tried to test it.. And yes it worked fine..
So then i got to backup my ATI VGA EDGE driver floppys..

I could make from 4 disks a image of it.. and saved it. Then i tried an other one, and it seemed that it had problems when reading it.. So i could retry and it worked..

After that tried a other floppy in this drive, and it couldnt read anymore..

Then it became with a error of the zero part of the floppy drive..
Then i cleaned the drive with a datalife cleaning disk with the included sheets (not the dry one but the one that are wet. (that warent dried out, still in good condition) just for 60 second (USED a program called TESTDRIVE) and then using the cleaning utility...

But after that the drive isnt working anymore. It gave me a read failure error..


Do i need to re-align the drive. And do i need always re-align after cleaning?
 
Last edited:
I would say start by cleaning the card edge connector. Maybe it has oxidation on it.

To test for alignment, format a disk, and put sometime on it.
If you can write and read to it, then maybe alignment, but if you can't then alignment is not your primary issue.

Later,
dabone
 
I have lots of old disks that constantly foul my floppy drive(s) causing me to have to clean them quite often. In all this time I have *never* realigned a floppy drive, nor have I even thought about it. They always seem to work right after the cleaning process. I use the abrasive diskettes moistened with a bit of the accompanying cleaning solution or alcohol. 10 or 15 seconds always does the trick. I'm not familiar with the Datalife kit but I would think it should do what it's intended for. Have you tried reading some newer, known good diskettes? If they read without errors then the drive is OK and doesn't need any further attention. Some types of older diskettes become impossible to read at all and can really foul the drive heads, quickly and badly, when you try to read them.
 
The card edge connector is brand new, so that couldnt be the problem here.. So there isnt any oxidation on it..
 
Stone said:
I have lots of old disks that constantly foul my floppy drive(s) causing me to have to clean them quite often. In all this time I have *never* realigned a floppy drive, nor have I even thought about it. They always seem to work right after the cleaning process. I use the abrasive diskettes moistened with a bit of the accompanying cleaning solution or alcohol. 10 or 15 seconds always does the trick. I'm not familiar with the Datalife kit but I would think it should do what it's intended for. Have you tried reading some newer, known good diskettes? If they read without errors then the drive is OK and doesn't need any further attention. Some types of older diskettes become impossible to read at all and can really foul the drive heads, quickly and badly, when you try to read them.
Click to expand...

When the drive was good, i had formatted 3 disks in it.. And it worked just fine..
After reading it, when the drive didnt work anymore, the floppy couldnt read anymore..

I tried to format a other floppy, but cant go further and the process would be aborted..

Read failure
And before that it gave me a Track 0 error..

I dont think the drive is dead, because i didnt touch the head or so. And i cant touch the head because its close on the upper side.
 
That's not what i meant. You need to try to read a *known good disk*. And I don't mean a disk you just formatted from a box of floppies. I commercially written disk. One that you can still read in another drive/computer. Do this after you have just run the cleaning process. One second of trying to read a bad disk is enough to foul the drive's heads, again. And, if you're using a box of floppies they're obviously old to begin with and they could be causing the problem. Make sense?
 
I've run into this too: Cheap disks will sometimes turn "sticky" and when you try to read them, the heads get a thin layer of goop on them. You clean the heads, but when you put the bad disk back in, it happens immediately again. The correct remedy is to say goodbye to the disk you were trying to read and immediately throw it away, clean the heads yet again, and then try reading a known good disk (that you preferably don't care about losing) to make sure you got all the goop off.
 
Robin4,

Note also that a head cleaning disk is designed for small amounts of dirt/oxide.

If bad disks are putting large amounts of oxide onto the heads, you may find that you need to use the cleaning disk many times. I did an experiment once when I used a particular box of bad disks. From memory, I had to use a cleaning disk about 20 times. Obviously, that figure will vary depening on how bad the oxide build-up is.

The cleaning method that works best/quickest for me (and some others on these forums) when there is a large build-up of oxide, is use isopropyl alcohol applied using a cotton tip (cotton bud). Care must be used to prevent the heads being damaged.
 
Ok, then iam going to try several disks out and sees if we got more progress on this problem..
For cleaning iam using DATALIFE by verbatim cleaning disks.. Its just a floppy sleeve with a sort of cloth in it and has fluorocarbon and isopropyl alcohol in it..

Isnt it bad for the heads if i clean it to much.. I tought i have red, that to much isnt that good for the heads..

But there isnt a problem with the alignment of this drive??? I tought that new drives could have bad aligned.. or are misaligned because of transport / sending it..

And last question.. Does the heads make contact with the surface of the floppydisk, or is there some space left (just like a magnet)
 
Robin4 said:
Ok, then iam going to try several disks out and sees if we got more progress on this problem..
For cleaning iam using DATALIFE by verbatim cleaning disks.. Its just a floppy sleeve with a sort of cloth in it and has fluorocarbon and isopropyl alcohol in it..

1) Isnt it bad for the heads if i clean it to much.. I tought i have red, that to much isnt that good for the heads..

2) But there isnt a problem with the alignment of this drive??? I tought that new drives could have bad aligned.. or are misaligned because of transport / sending it..

3) And last question.. Does the heads make contact with the surface of the floppydisk, or is there some space left (just like a magnet)
Click to expand...
1) If it isn't working you've got nothing to lose by trying, right?

2) You said it worked when you first installed it, didn't you? If it wasn't misaligned when you used it the first few times how can you say it was caused during transport?

3) If they didn't make contact they wouldn't get stuff on them that needs to be removed.
 
Problem is already solved. Drive is working again.. I think the heads where just wet from the cleaning procedure..
And there was a floppy disk with the track 0 problem. Cant reformat it again, so throw that away..
 
the drive may be fine you might have a factor problem 360k disks do 9 sec/tracK whereas a 1.2 does 15 sectors/tract also the heads on a 1.2 do 80 trAcks where a 360 does 40 tracks the 1.2 also does a speed change
 
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