zicherka wrote on 2025-11-20, 20:50:

I also have a question about the order of the ribbon cables on the head(s): the upper head is connected to the socket closest to the floppy disks, and the lower one to the socket closer to the 26-pin interface (photo).

Not sure about the order and your photo is a bit small for my eyes but in general the flex cables must have good freedom of movement. One should not cross or rub on the other, and usually should appear same length (one will be longer of course). That being said it might just be this particular drive is a bit different as it is more complicated than standard floppy drives.

You can swap the head connectors around, nothing bad should happen to the heads, AFAIR these two are identical pinout. If you want/need to re-arrange the FFC then think about how it will work when the head moves, again to avoid any possible rubbing or other conflicts that could damage the cables during drive operation.

If you get motor spin and head movement when you expect it I'd say the external connector is OK, and the problem is with the drive itself.

Hi! Thanks for your reply and I apologize for the late response.
I think—like you—that the floppy drive is faulty. I've swapped the tape heads and had a few 1.44MB floppy disks for testing.
I suppose I'll have to wait for a miracle and find this exact floppy drive model on some auction site. This, I suspect, also doesn't guarantee that I'll be able to run the operating system on this computer.
Regards.

zicherka wrote on 2025-12-08, 19:18:

I suppose I'll have to wait for a miracle and find this exact floppy drive model on some auction site. This, I suspect, also doesn't guarantee that I'll be able to run the operating system on this computer.

I'm not familiar with the Jamicon Spacestation INS-950 but since you have the pinout for the custom ribbon cable I'd build an interface to a standard 3.5" drive, have it outside the system if need be. In most cases extra 30cm cable is not a problem at all. This way you can test the computer, myabe install OS if you have internal HDD, while waiting for that miracle.

Also it's not impossible that the drive you have works, just is badly misaligned due to mechanical shock or vibrations in transport or something. Sometimes it's as easy as blowing away (with compressed air) dirt/dust packed into track 0 sensor which now triggers in a sligtly different place due to that. A misaligned drive will read and write floppies but only the ones it formatted. While it's not going to let you just transfer floppies as-is, it's not completly useless and more importantly you'd know a repair is possible.

EDIT: Does it have mechanical swithes for write protect and media type? I've seen tons of these go bad, if the media switch is reporting 720k media to the drive then all 1.4M floppies might be unreadable if this computer relies on the signal from the floppy to mobo for HD selection.