floppy drive repair tips

[bigmessowires]

What's the recommended repair method for a floppy drive that has difficulty reading disks? I looked through the floppy lubrication tutorial on the wiki, but that seems intended to fix insert/eject problems, not disk reading problems.

I have five Macs with internal 800K floppies or Superdrives, and also one 800K external drive, and a few problems:

- The 800K drive can't ever seem to read a whole disk. When inserted, it often says "The disk <correct disk name> needs minor repairs", but after attempting the repairs it just ejects the disk. When attempting to boot from the drive, I get a happy Mac face for a few seconds, but then it ejects the disk. Attempting to format a disk in this drive results in an initialization failure.

- Disks inserted in the PowerBook Superdrive often say they need minor repairs. After performing the repairs, the disk mounts normally. But if the disk is then brought to one of the compact Macs, it often says the disk is unreadable. So the "minor repairs" performed by the powerbook cause the other Macs to stop reading the disk, although this doesn't happen 100%.

- If a PB-written disk mounts OK in a compact Mac's drive, it will sometimes experience read errors on particular files.

[techknight]

clean and demagnitize the R/W heads, if that fails, check for and replace any electrolytics on the drives board.