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IBM 4865 external drive woes

snq

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 29, 2009
Messages
164
Location
Sweden, way up north
Hi all,

My 4865 drive has started acting up :( It won't read anything whatsoever any more, or write for that matter. It used to work fine connected in the same setup as it is now, but it hasn't been used for a couple of years.
The floppys I'm testing with are working fine in a different drive so bad media is probably not the issue.

Symptoms:
Light goes on when I try to access it, and it spins up.
Head doesn't move - probably because it already is where it wants to be, if I manually move it out a bit and then try to access it it does move back when accessing.
When I try to access it I get "Drive not ready".

As a quick hack I added a piece of electrical tape so the media sensor/button gets pushed down a little bit more.
Now when I try to access it I get either "General Failure" when trying to read, or "Invalid Media or Track 0 Bad - Disk Unusable" when I try to format it.

I cleaned the heads, but that's about as far as my diagnostic skills go.
Any tips on how to proceed? I really want to get it working again!
 
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