VOGONS


First post, by Deksor

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Hello everyone

I have two 5"1/4 floppy disk drives. One didn't work at all and the other one was very picky I cleaned them the best I could but it didn't help at all. But both of them did some marks on the floppy which was odd since they were completely clean. But I figured out that the heads' spring was too strong and once I loosened them, the picky floppy disk drive was munch less picky and the one that wasn't working was able to format one floppy disk (though it can't finish because it can't write "BOOT" and so the formated floppy isn't readable) it's far from perfect but it's still munch better than before. Before that, the bad unit always said "invalid support or incorrect track 0" and the picky one said the same thing with floppies it didn't like

Have you heared of such things before ? I'd like to repair them completely (well I don't know if the "picky" one isn't already fixed, maybe the floppies that still doesn't work with it are just bad, but the other one is still in a poor shape since it can only format one floppy out of 7-8 and it can't even finish the format process)

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Reply 1 of 1, by Jo22

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Hi, just curious, are they half-height or full-height drives ? 360K or 1.2MB ?
Maybe these springs got hard/stiff due to their age. I also had trouble with 5.25" floppy drive several times..
But all in all, they were more robust and less troublesome than most of their 3.5" cousins. 😀

At one time, I encountered a strange compatibility issue with 5.25" drives that wasn't even their fault:
My 586 machine refused to read 5.25" floppies. I always got an read error/drive not ready error.
I changed drives, cleaned them, changed them again - but no vail.

Later I found out it was the Pentium's floppy controller. It wasn't defective, but for some reason it used a lower signaling level, I believe.
Or in simple words - it hadn't enough "oomph" to drive the drive. It was from the 3.3v era, so I guess this had to be expected.

Anyway, installing an ISA floppy controller card solved my issues. But for not so tech-savvy users, solving this issue must be hell. 🙁

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