First post, by CapitanOdessa
Hello!
I've been having problems with one of my floppy drives. I've never tested it before, and yesterday I thought it was the time to get it working nice! So I attached it to a computer, I put a formatted floppy disk from a drive I know that works, and used imd119 to see if it read everything fine... What I found was not good.
For some reason, it works great!!! Except when it doesn't. From time to time, it skips at 15, and I don't know why that happens. Have you guys ever encountered a similar problem? Even the Test RPM failed from time to time, if I wasn't lucky enough to get many reads with no errors in a row. The speed was 360RPM so that worked fine. I've cleaned the heads using isopropyl alcohol, everything looks pretty clean with no dirt or dust so... I tried adjusting the little motor behind, I've tried manually moving the head a little to the sides, and I get the same results. I'm running out of ideas, do you think this drive is dead?
The drive is a CHINON FR-506, it looks sturdy and nice.
EDIT: I managed to find the culprit that prevented me from reading disks! I'm not very well-versed in the name of the parts that make a floppy drive run, but I found out that moving what looked like some sort of laser a little bit to the back solved my issue.
HOWEVER, I still can't write. I can read disks I made with another drive, but I can't write to them. I don't have calibration disks or anything like that, so I'd be content if I can make these two drives work with each other. That'd be good enough for me. Does anyone have an idea of why this could be happening?
