Macintosh 512Ke floppy drive repair

[3pcedev]

Hi all,

Got a Mac 512ke which I've had on the shelf for a while. It works fine, however the internal floppy drive is quite flaky. Sometimes it will boot and read disks, but then fail intermittently. Other times it refuses to read disks at all. In the past I have been booting it using an external drive, which is fine, however only having 1 working drive limits the capabilities of this machine significantly!

I removed the drive once and found the previous owner had lubricated it quite well (almost too well). It ejects just fine so I focused my efforts on cleaning the heads. This didn't change anything at all.

So my questions are - any tips on repair/diagnosis of the existing 800k drive?

Also - I've got a plethora of spare working 'late model' 1.44mb floppy drives from Mac Classics. Can they be installed in the 512Ke and work simply as '800k' drives, much like an IBM XT can run a 1.44mb as 720k?

 

[mwillegal]

A while back, I put some experiences that I had fixing 400K Mac drives on my blog. I'm not sure if it is of any help, but just in case.

http://www.willegal.net/blog/?p=6218

regards,
Mike Willegal

 

[DFinnigan]

Hi all,
- I've got a plethora of spare working 'late model' 1.44mb floppy drives from Mac Classics. Can they be installed in the 512Ke and work simply as '800k' drives, much like an IBM XT can run a 1.44mb as 720k?

I believe so. Try one and see. Sony 800K and 1.4MB mechanisms are more similar than the early 400K units.

 

[bibilit]

The 1.44 Mb will work for sure.

 

[olePigeon]

If you have an external 800K drive (A9M0106), you can actually swap out the mechanism with a 1.44MB drive and turn it into an external SuperDrive, which is useful for any Mac with a floppy port.

Alternatively, you can extract the little board inside the external 3.5" drive and run the LED to the front o the computer. You'll then have a floppy indicator light for your internal floppy drive.