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Floppy Disk Drive (720 KB) going south or other?

alexandere

New Member
Joined
May 3, 2012
Messages
9
Location
SE, MS, Hattiesburg, MS Area, 39401
i have a Tandy TL/2, Tandy 1000 series model, 80286 Intel processor, 8 mhz, has a ROM chip with MS-DOs 3.X, and a couple of other files, and my floppy drive that came with it is being a bit fussy, and I was hoping for some help with that. I can put a floppy disk in it after boot up, and it will read it, but if i take out that floppy and put in a different floppy disk, the computer does not want to read the new one, it still wants to see the initial floppy disk. Has the drive gone bad or going bad or is there something I am forgetting about using floppy drives? please advise. thanks!
 
I believe what you're experiencing might be an alignment issue, particularly if that first disk was formatted and written on the drive and the second floppy either was not or was formatted and written at a much earlier time.

3.5" drives can be realigned, but you need some sort of standard to judge the alignment. I think if you search on "alignment" in this forum, you'll get some hints.
 
This sounds like an issue with the pin 34 'Disk Change output signal'. Check your cable connections, i.e., reseat them.
 
I wonder different floppy disk is same 720KB or 1.44MB HD.

Valid point, although if it's a 720K drive, it wouldn't see the difference. I'm assuming that the OP knows the difference.

Stone, if this were a pin 34 issue (some 720K drives don't implement it), I'd expect the problem to be one of seeing old data on a newly-inserted disk--the physical sectoring would be the same, so both disks would be readable. But perhaps I'm misunderstanding the OP.
 
Assuming it uses them I'd also check the tiny switches, especially the one that senses whether a disk is inserted/removed.
 
well, i pulled the cables out of the mother board and the floppy drive, vaccuumed some dust away ( i am uncertain of dust matters, but i am a little OCD if you will please ), and reinserted the cable firmly into MOBO and FDD, and turned on computer, and problem solved! yeah! Hip hip Hooray! thanks for the tech support about the cable problem, member "Stone" . . .
 
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