First post, by jhandsel
I've got a Mitsubishi MF504C high density drive that was working perfectly until I tried to install a game off an old diskette. The diskette looked normal, but after I inserted it the drive made a loud rubbing noise, as if the heads were clamped too tightly on the disk's surface while it was spinning.
Thinking that the drive had developed a problem since I last used it, I put the same floppy into another drive and I got the same loud rubbing noise. Now neither of them will read any floppy! The drives just spin and I get the standard Abort/Retry/Fail message. Sometimes I can cd into the drive and see the contents, but the drive won't read anything larger than a single-line text file. I haven't managed to diagnose what the damage is — hopefully just misaligned heads, but I can't rule out permanent damage 🙁
This is really weird as nothing looked wrong with the game floppy (pics attached). On closer inspection there are striations on the disk's surface as if it had indeed been clamped too tightly, but I've no idea why this would happen.
Has anyone seen this happen before?