First post, by nzoomed
Ive recently started reliving my woes and bad memories of the FDD.
For the most part, they actually work fine, providing you have good disks and a clean drive.
Ive been surprised how well a dirty disk with mould has still been able to read on an old drive, but then ive had new disks give me trouble in the past.
Ive got a few old drives that appear to work, but give read errors on boot up, i cleaned the heads with isopropyl alcohol and still gives errors.
Is this typically a head out of align when this sort of thing happens?
Since i have a few brand new drives to spare, is it worth me trying to fix them, or just throw out and use nice new drives?
I see a company called Athana still makes them, in various formats including 8 inch! I wonder if they are the ones still producing them for the DoD?
their website looks old, but the commodore 64 community have been using their disks from what I can tell.
The quality of the later disks, as far as Imation goes anyway seemed to drop off in the later years, one thing i noticed as a cost cutting measure is they did not fill the whole inside of the disk with that micro fibre material to keep them clean and protected, its only got one tiny piece inside, which makes me wonder how easily they get scratched from the casing inside?
I still find the FDD quite impractical, and many DOSgames quickly needed to be spanned on multipule disks anyway and I dont bother using them much other than installing DOS, the odd game or using other boot disks for diagnostics, etc.
I still have not tested my older CD-ROM drive to see if it can read CD-R disks or not, but my only two options are either use CD-ROM or remove the HDD and connect to a PC.
Failing that I could install a CF card adapter at the rear of the PC too.
I try and keep my systems original, particularly XT machines, but modern conveniences help for sure, and save wear and tear on your gear.
regarding keeping the drive heads clean.
How often should you clean the heads? I have a pack of 3M cleaning disks that claim you do not need to add cleaning fluid to them. Are these any good?
