I got an YD380 floppy drive. It is correctly detected during boot but it will read only one out of twenty floppies. Formatting floppies doesn’t work at all.
Is there any checklist I can run through to test it? Anything I can do to repair it?
It makes a weird „pling“ sound a second or so after it stopped.
Might want to check the info on this page:
http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/drive.html
Here's the maintenance manual on it as well:
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_yeDataF … Feb1985_2682963
If there's a belt in there somewhere, it surely needs to be replaced by now.
Plastic cogs also tend to get brittle as they get old, and may have issues.
If I were you, I'd test formatting a disk on it, and try it in another drive, or writing data and reading it on a known good drive. That would help narrow down the problem.
wrote:I got an YD380 floppy drive. It is correctly detected during boot but it will read only one out of twenty floppies. Formatting floppies doesn’t work at all.
Is there any checklist I can run through to test it? Anything I can do to repair it?
It makes a weird „pling“ sound a second or so after it stopped.
No such thing as FDD "correctly detected during boot" - most BIOSes won't comply if FDD is broken, different than configured or not connected at all.
Have you cleaned heads? Doesn the head assembly move without problems? On these old FDDs I usually put a drop of silicone oil on the guide rails. Does the disk drive motor spin without problems?
Are there any electrolytic caps on the PCB?
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the pling sound is probably the head load solenoid unloading
clean the heads
1. Clean the heads
2. Clean the old grease and dirt/grime off of the rails and apply a bit of new grease. I use synthetic grease as it tends to not dry up like petroleum based grease.
I have fixed a bunch of 5.25" and 3.5" drives just by doing those two things. Some of them would not read at all before I cleaned and greased them.
Thanks for the hints. The solenoid does make sense.
I will try to clean the heads. It might require a bit of disassembly. I think they are blocked by the PCB.
The rails seem to slide well. But I might try the synthetic / lithium grease anyway, if cleaning the heads is not sufficient.
wrote:No such thing as FDD "correctly detected during boot" - most BIOSes won't comply if FDD is broken, different than configured or not connected at all.
Of couse there is. And most BIOSes (all I ever saw actually) will complain if the floppy drive is not connected or set to the wrong type. It's part of POST to do a full seek to the last track and back to track 0. If that fails, you'll get an error message.
It won't detect if a floppy is broken. But there's a huge difference between "detecting" and "testing" anyway,
wrote:Thanks for the hints. The solenoid does make sense.
I will try to clean the heads. It might require a bit of disassembly. I think they are blocked by the PCB.
The rails seem to slide well. But I might try the synthetic / lithium grease anyway, if cleaning the heads is not sufficient.
do yourself a favor and get a head cleaning disk kit if you plan to mass with retro floppy drives on an ongoing basis, cleaning them by hand is tedious and can lead to misalignment if you are too heavy handed
I once had a drive that didn't read diskettes because the plastic part that holds the diskette in place worn out.
If I gently pushed it down while reading a diskette it worked fine.
Just wondering -- are there many out there who would find it useful to have a couple of 5.25" drives that don't work (or don't work reliably)? Not sure how many venture into repair of these, and I've got a couple that have seen some %!$# that I just don't really want to deal with.
I'd be interested as I'm heavily delving into builds and building custom electronics for some of them.
