Hello Folks.
I picked up a working Model IV with two 5.25" drives. Originally the drives would 'work' but would sound terrible and clunk a lot. Neither drive would format a blank disk. I ran an old 5.25" cleaner disk on it. Which didnt seem to help much if at all. Since this was a Craigslist find I really dont know the history of the diskettes I was using or the drives. It came with two Texas Peripherals that I believe are full height SS/DD.
I removed the drives and watched the stepper while trying to format a disk. It would never move much past the halfway point and would clunk and just shake at that position. I unplugged the drive and noticed that I wasnt able to manually move the head past this point as well. I couldnt observe be any kind of a blockage and it moved freely for first half. I used 90% isopropyl alcohol and qtips and swabbed and dabbed around the ends of the stepper letting it soak in. It moved much freer at this point so I qtipped the rails as much as I could as well. The drives are also much quieter than before!
After this I was unable to get either drive to boot. I thought maybe I might have bumped something out of alignment when cleaning it. By slowly hand moving the head assembly I can hear the micro switch make contact when the assembly is at the outermost for track 0. The best either drive now does is the heads return to track 0 (or at least all the way in that direction), and stay in that position. If I press the reset button they will move out a slight amount until I release the reset button.
Another fear is that I might have left the diskettes in the drive while powering it on and off a few times. Would this spike the data on the disk? I remembered later on that as a best practice diskettes came out of the drive before powering off, probably for this reason.
I tried one or two of my older disks but Im not sure if they are still good anyways. Whats the best direction to proceed to get things working? I do have some test gear and did work on these back in the day but thats a few decades ago but either way, getting at least one drive functional and being able to boot would be required for most of what I could do at home.
Thank you.
I picked up a working Model IV with two 5.25" drives. Originally the drives would 'work' but would sound terrible and clunk a lot. Neither drive would format a blank disk. I ran an old 5.25" cleaner disk on it. Which didnt seem to help much if at all. Since this was a Craigslist find I really dont know the history of the diskettes I was using or the drives. It came with two Texas Peripherals that I believe are full height SS/DD.
I removed the drives and watched the stepper while trying to format a disk. It would never move much past the halfway point and would clunk and just shake at that position. I unplugged the drive and noticed that I wasnt able to manually move the head past this point as well. I couldnt observe be any kind of a blockage and it moved freely for first half. I used 90% isopropyl alcohol and qtips and swabbed and dabbed around the ends of the stepper letting it soak in. It moved much freer at this point so I qtipped the rails as much as I could as well. The drives are also much quieter than before!
After this I was unable to get either drive to boot. I thought maybe I might have bumped something out of alignment when cleaning it. By slowly hand moving the head assembly I can hear the micro switch make contact when the assembly is at the outermost for track 0. The best either drive now does is the heads return to track 0 (or at least all the way in that direction), and stay in that position. If I press the reset button they will move out a slight amount until I release the reset button.
Another fear is that I might have left the diskettes in the drive while powering it on and off a few times. Would this spike the data on the disk? I remembered later on that as a best practice diskettes came out of the drive before powering off, probably for this reason.
I tried one or two of my older disks but Im not sure if they are still good anyways. Whats the best direction to proceed to get things working? I do have some test gear and did work on these back in the day but thats a few decades ago but either way, getting at least one drive functional and being able to boot would be required for most of what I could do at home.
Thank you.