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I just wrecked my 5.25 floppy drive!

G

generic486

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 30, 2012
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290
Location
Australia
I am really annoyed as I just got my XT and I was playing around with it. I started formatting some old disks with it. Now these disks were kinda suspect as I have prevouisly wrecked 3 other FDD's with them. I had no idea why they were not reading the disks. (it always gave me general data failure) So anyway, I put in this yellow disk into the drive and it sounded a bit more stuck then the other disks, I let it format and noticed after a while all the sectors were bad. I took it out and put in a disk that was working only two minutes prior to find that the drive was wrecked.:mad: It reads but now it will not write or format. I am so angry because I pay so much for these drives and they break and I don't mistreat them. I believe the heads are partially stripped but I do not know any place which would sell replacements. The drive is a Chinon F502LII and the other three wrecked drives are 2x teac FD-55GFR and a misubishi MF504C-318U. If anyboady can help that would be great or if anyboady has that chinon drive for $10 in working condition. I just spent so much money on these ($100+) and they are wrecked. Please help.
 
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Could be that the heads are just coated in gunk. Remove the drive and clean the heads manually and carefully with isopropyl alcohol. Your drives might then be ok.

Then throw those disks away.

Tez
 
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Sadly it only made it worse. Now it wont even read. Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it on the other drives but still not working. I had a look on ebay and it is $34 dollars for another drive and it is untested. Oh dear.[SPECIAL] I was going to spend my money on some software for this machine but now I guess I can't. I am so sick and tired of this happening. Well at least I know what the problem is but after $100. This is the disk that did it. I will have joy destroying this disk for revenge.:DView attachment 8521 BTW I just wrote Do not use after I realised that this disk was the culprit
I just about to throw out all my 5.25 floppies that I did not test working. that means I be throwing out about 100 but at least this will not happen again. Looks like the verbatim disk were the only ones that work fine.
 
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If you use a head cleaning didkette on those drives they will all probably all work again. I foul drives constantly with all the 20 - 25 year old software I have and the cleaning diskettes/solution always brings them back to useable condition.
 
Thanks. I'll have to get one. This problem seems to happen a lot more with 5.25 flopies than 3.5, I wonder why?
 
Ya', I've noticed that, too. Maybe the manufacturing process is different. But I do get the problem occasionally with 3.5", especially if they've been stored for 15 years in my damp garage. :)
 
I'll second Stone's floppy head cleaner as a solution. I had several NOS 5.25" drives I thought were dead and weren't responding to hand cleaning. Add in two old ones I had from back in the day, same issue. I ended up ordering a few boxes of the "Floppiclene" head cleaner from an ebay seller (buying two so that shipping wouldn't be as much of a killer), and got all of the drives back in perfect working order. Well worth the $26 USD I spent on the cleaners, especially when they came with 50 cleaning pads.
 
Hi
First, cleaning heads has to be done with care.
Many are on floating springs that can be damaged
by excess force.
I agree that the problem was crud on the heads.
Some of the older disk do tend to lose material
from the surface more than others. The cleaning
of these is easy with swabs and rubbing alcohol.
There is another problem with 5.25 disk that one
should be aware of. The liners of many of the so
called higher quality disk were attached to the inside
of the envelopes with a stickem that eventually
bleads through the liner and sticks to the surface
of the disk. If you get this gunk on the heads, it
takes something stronger to get it off the heads.
One can tell these disk by rotating them in the
envelopes and looking at the surfaces. The gunk
show up as bloches on the surface and often
the disk may have a hard time spining in the
envelope.
When the heads are contaminated with this, I've
used GooGone or similar such products.
Dwight
 
Definitely clean the drive. I had numerous 3.5" Mac Superdrives that wouldn't read disks. They would take the disk, spin a little and spit the disk back out.

Ran the cleaning disk in them 2 times and they worked beautifully. Same thing with one of the Apple 5.25 drives I had. Cleaned it and it worked.
 
Personally, I hate those stupid cleaning disks. They never do near as good a job as cleaning the heads manually with a q-tip and alcohol.

But to the OP - you're not "wrecking" the drive. The heads are just dirty. It's a fact of life with these old machines, and more so with old, poorly stored media. Manually clean the heads, and you'll be fine. It's very rare to actually have a bad floppy drive that can't be fixed with a little cleaning. They are incredibly reliable. Well, most of them.

-Ian
 
RetroHacker_ said:
Personally, I hate those stupid cleaning disks. They never do near as good a job as cleaning the heads manually with a q-tip and alcohol.
Click to expand...

I couldn't agree more, I only use Q-tips and alcohol. It will take more cleaning than you might expect to get the drive reading/writing like it should. That Iron Oxide really adheres and is hard to remove. Even when you look at the heads and all appears clean it usually will need to be cleaned a couple times more. After cleaning, give the alcohol time to evaporate before loading a disk.

As has been mentioned, get rid of those disks that are fouling your drive heads. You will be glad you did. I had your exact problem and after I realized the disks were the issue I got rid of ALL the old disks I had, that was after having cleaned my drive heads multiple times due to fouling, I kept thinking "all my old disks can't be bad" but enough of them were to justify getting rid of all of them.

The cleaning disks are abrasive to drive heads and they dont do as good a job. They are easier to use, though.
 
Hi
Those with belts can have the belt slip
or gunk from the belt sticking to the pulleys.
Other than that, they are quite good.
I don't care fro cleaning disk either but
for many that are not inclined to open a machine,
they are still the OK. They never do as good
as the alcohol and swab.
Dwight
 
RetroHacker_ said:
Personally, I hate those stupid cleaning disks. They never do near as good a job as cleaning the heads manually with a q-tip and alcohol.
But to the OP - you're not "wrecking" the drive.
Click to expand...
I don't use cleaning disks either, but at least they're relatively safe; as Dwight points out, it is fairly easy to wreck the drive when poking around with a Q-tip if you're not careful.
 
I'll tell you how I clean the heads, using the cleaning diskette, so that you have the optimum chance of cleaning them the first time around.

Pour the alcohol on to the opening in the cleaning disk (I mean SOAK it) and, with the computer off, insert the cleaning disk into the drive and close the latch.

Let it sit like that for about 10 minutes (to soften the oxides on the heads) and then turn on the computer. The diskette will spin until it get's bored and gives up. Open the latch and close it again, a few times, and the heads should be sparkling clean.
 
Thanks so much to everybody. I've got a big job ahead of me. I'll try the q tip method again as I have that right here. I'll see how it goes.
 
well that's good

well that's good

Great news. I got the Chinon working using the qtips. I has some isoproponol mixture mixture that had 85% iso, 14.5 water and 0.5 acetic acid and managed to get it working. I did swab all the drives numerous times but only the chinon has worked consistanly. One TEAC works sometimes and not others, the other TEAC is giving me General failure and the misubishi is not communicating with the computer at all. But thanks to everyone so far.
 
generic486 said:
Great news. I got the Chinon working using the qtips. I has some isoproponol mixture mixture that had 85% iso, 14.5 water and 0.5 acetic acid and managed to get it working.
Click to expand...

You're probably OK, but 85% is definitely not what is standard for this application. I would also be very concerned about using 0.5% acetic acid in there. That's a lot! That will likely eat the metal in the head more than would be tolerable if you did it multiple times. Also, keep in mind that a micron thick layer of anything, including ferric acetate, degrades sensitivity.

Isopropyl and water is not isoprypyl. It is isopropyl and water - commonly called rubbing alcohol. They mix it with water for medical use where that is a requirement because of the osmotic pressure differential on the cell walls of bacteria. It's a completely different application.

The reason 99% (or higher) isopropyl is always specified for tape heads is that many heads use a soft ferric material which can easily get a thin film of oxidation in some environments. Acids are definitely out of the question.

Anyway, you're probably fine, and it's great to hear that you got things going. :)
 
I wiped the heads with a clean qtips after applying as I though that might be an issue but in fact using this mixture after about 10 applications and rubbing the leftover on a qtip I got the two TEAC's working. The misubishi is not commincating with the computer but it's probably the jumper settings.
Also I found out something interesting. I foramtted afloppy in my XT but in my 486 it says it says data reading error or somethinglike that. But When I format something in my 486 and put the disk in my XT it says the same thing. I just really need to copy this parking utillty to the hard drive as it is a ST-225 and they do not self park. But yeah, I am really happy I got those working.:D
 
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