Whenever I clean a floppy drive. Then I take off the top shield, and carefully clean the heads with IPA and a cue tip. The drive mechanism (that snail driving the heads back and forth) will be oiled with one of those acid free oils. Americans call it gun oil. Europeans some times call it sewing machine oil. Lots of youtube video's about this. Just search for drive cleaning and Amiga's. It seems as there are not that many drive cleaning videos regarding pc.

For Floppy drives I use the floppy cleaner like you + compressed air at a 5 cms distance minimum but not any closer.

I do not use cotton swabs for two reasons (I hate them);
- Using a swap implies applying some level of direct force and even if this is little I have no way to know at what point of pressure I would be causing any misalignment.
- The fibers get easily hooked in any little sharp edge, the ones you see you can remove but the ones you don't see stay inside and might end up moving to somewhere where they shouldn't be dirt, specially the lense or the main axis that has grease.
What the floppy cleaner does't clean, the compressed air handles. At least in my case, used at medium force and carefully works.

Yeah I just take off the top cover which is easy to do and clean the heads with a q-tip and isopropyl alcholol.
Also oil the metal slider mechanism and eject mechanism with a small shot of WD-40. Also make sure the motor is not seized. If it is then tap the back of the motor with the head of a screw driver to knock it loose.
Make sure the motor gears spin. Also check the alignment of the motor gear.

Video
https://youtu.be/a3Vc3SdZJ2Y

Hi. Just to say I killed an IBM PS2-50Z floppy disc drive by cleaning the head with a cotton bud (Q-tip) and Isopropyl Alcohol (IPA). 😵 My suggestion: Dampen a lint-free cloth with IPA, place it between the heads, and move it around to get rid of any muck. This way, you needn't pry the heads apart.

Along those same lines, is it possible to tell the drive to seek somewhere else on the disk to move the head to another area after its been used a lot?

ImageDisk has a mode where you can clean the head with a cleaning diskette. It moves the head along the disk, so it won't wear out a particular part of it.

Also, before I got my hands on a few real cleaning diskettes, I used to use the inner lining of 3.5" diskettes. I took the jacket from an old 5.25" diskette, opened it up flat, affixed a piece of the lining to the window and closed it up. Then voila, a makeshift cleaning diskette. Do this at your own risk though.

astonsmith wrote:

Along those same lines, is it possible to tell the drive to seek somewhere else on the disk to move the head to another area after its been used a lot?

ImageDisk has a mode where you can clean the head with a cleaning diskette. It moves the head along the disk, so it won't wear out a particular part of it.

Also, before I got my hands on a few real cleaning diskettes, I used to use the inner lining of 3.5" diskettes. I took the jacket from an old 5.25" diskette, opened it up flat, affixed a piece of the lining to the window and closed it up. Then voila, a makeshift cleaning diskette. Do this at your own risk though.

Thanks, this is exactly the kind of info I'm looking for.

I wonder if it's feasible to make new head cleaning disks. My wife has a Brother die cutting machine so cutting out circular disks wouldn't be hard. Does anyone know what those cleaning disks are made out of?

Also is there a DOS utility that will do a thorough head cleaning like imagedisk? I'm still curious if anyone has found a way to clean a cleaning disk too.