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Hosed Disk Drives

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bluethunder

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 5, 2010
Messages
209
Location
Calgary, Alberta
For a couple months, I've been fighting to get my old H-89 back to life. I could not get the FD-100's or spares working properly to save my life. Some wouldn't read, some wouldn't write. Some would sort of work, and fail past track 30.

I cleaned the heads with isopropyl, lubed the step worm gear, and swapped the felt from dead drives into the mostly working ones. Even found some NOS 10 hard sectored disks.

Low and behold, standard PC 360k DSDD drives work fine in it.

I had a couple TEAC 360k drives that came in an external floppy enclosure that was freecycled to me.

The Jumpers lined right accross with my reference for the Heath drive set up, HS, DS0, DS1, DS2, HM. Once those jumpers were set, the drives worked right out of the box.

Booted off of the CPM distribution disks, was able to format new and old media.

Even able to create new disks from the H89LDR images.

I was always under the impression, that the drives were proprietary design, or of a type that was only available in the 70s or 80s. Especially considering that this is a hard sectored system, so I thought the drives had to be set up for that.

So, if you have an old CPM computer with hosed drives, with a little research, you might be able to swap in a cheap and available 5 1/4 PC floppy.

The other bonus is, I can hook up these drives now, to a PC, and use better diagnostic software and the manuals to try and repair them.
 
Yes, they are very well made..

No belts to slack off as well, being direct drive.

I also like that they are HH drives, so I can elimate some desk clutter eventually, by moving them both into the H-89 chassis from the external box.
 
I've just acquired an Epson PF-10 which spins up OK but is giving me bad sector errors on every disk I try. Do you think there's any possibility of swapping out the drive mechanism for a generic one?
 
The drive mechanism for the PF-10 is a 67.5 tpi track-to-track pitch, which is different from the standard 135 tpi pitch. So, no--a generic drive won't work.

Have you checked the rechargeable battery on the drive PCB? IIRC, the PF-10 does not work from the AC adapter, but relies on the internal battery being charged.
 
The battery seems ok, I'll clean the heads and check they are moving ok. Am I right in thinking I can only use epson pre-formatted disks, I can't seem to find a reference to formatting disks with the px8?
 
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