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Toshiba T1850 floppy drive

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First post, by roydz

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Hi,

I've recently got my hands on a Toshiba T1850 laptop & it works perfectly after fixing the LCD which just required a recap. My only issue is the floppy drive which refuses to work even after replacing the drive belt. I've got myself a SD to IDE adapter & after flashing the firmware found from one of the threads in here the laptop detects it as a 120MB hard drive perfectly, but I need to install MS DOS & WIndows onto the SD card but without a floppy drive I cant do this.

I was wondering if there was an emulator that I could hook up to the laptop or even set the SD card up on a virtual machine to be able to boot it, but I have tried VirtualBox & VMware to try and setup the SD card with just the basic MSDOS. I just get on one 'missing operating system' or 'Use Toshiba Basic'.

I did have a thought of cloning the old hard drive but Windows refuses to mount the drive on the docks I have tried.

Any help would be grateful.

Reply 1 of 4, by Deunan

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roydz wrote on 2024-05-19, 15:11:

My only issue is the floppy drive which refuses to work even after replacing the drive belt.

Does it spin at all? JP drive from '90 tend to have oxidated contacts in the media detect / media type switches. It is sometimes possible to flood them with contact cleaner spray and work the switch to fix it, although desoldering it and opening for gives better results. But it's risky, these were not really meant to be opened - not glued but the tiny wings that keep them together tend to get damaged. So if you want to commit to it then do it right the first time or have spared on hand, you do not want to open them more than once.

Reply 2 of 4, by roydz

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Deunan wrote on 2024-05-20, 10:43:
roydz wrote on 2024-05-19, 15:11:

My only issue is the floppy drive which refuses to work even after replacing the drive belt.

Does it spin at all? JP drive from '90 tend to have oxidated contacts in the media detect / media type switches. It is sometimes possible to flood them with contact cleaner spray and work the switch to fix it, although desoldering it and opening for gives better results. But it's risky, these were not really meant to be opened - not glued but the tiny wings that keep them together tend to get damaged. So if you want to commit to it then do it right the first time or have spared on hand, you do not want to open them more than once.

Yes it spins up, I flipped the floppy driver over and saw both the motor and the central disc spinning, but it’s as if it’s not getting any signal to start reading the disc.

Reply 3 of 4, by Deunan

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Could be dirty track 0 sensor. These are optical but can get stuffed with dust. Did you remove any parts of the drive to fix the belt? If so you might have caused head alignment problem - it's fixable but requires some skill and a working system pereferably (and a scope to do it right) unless you want to build your own rig to power/test the drive. Since it's a laptop one and not a standard PC connector.

Reply 4 of 4, by roydz

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Deunan wrote on 2024-05-20, 11:02:

Could be dirty track 0 sensor. These are optical but can get stuffed with dust. Did you remove any parts of the drive to fix the belt? If so you might have caused head alignment problem - it's fixable but requires some skill and a working system pereferably (and a scope to do it right) unless you want to build your own rig to power/test the drive. Since it's a laptop one and not a standard PC connector.

I had to open the floppy drive to remove the disintegrated belt, but I didn’t touch the head motor and was careful with the head that it didn’t move to the side.

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