Here's a weird one.
6-ish years ago when I bought my Quadra 700 the floppy drive was totally solid with years of caked on dust, and incapable of injecting or ejecting a disk. I stripped, cleaned, lubricated, just the usual, and it worked great afterwards.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago, and I was trying to recover some rare disks that I bought from eBay. Unfortunately they were ruined, but one in particular was in really bad shape and transferred material to the heads and left tracks on the disk. Any subsequent disk also came out of the drive with tracks on it. So I pulled it apart again and cleaned the heads. I had to scrape some of the media material off to start with because it was stuck on pretty well, then I finished with IPA and cotton buds.
Unfortunately after this treatment the drive wouldn't read disks any more. I messed with it a for a few hours before I gave up and put it back in the machine, thinking the heads were just shot ( I didn't know about the track zero sensor at the time, so perhaps it could also have been that).
Fast forward again to yesterday evening, and I was engaged in some SCSI shenanigans that resulted in no bootable volume on the hard drive. Without thinking, I found a disk tools disk and shoved it in. It was only after the happy Mac appeared on screen that I thought "Wait a minute, this drive doesn't work!".
I tried a few more bootable floppies to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and sure enough they all booted right up no problem. With an OS back on the HD, the floppy drive is working 100% normally.
How is this possible?! I am 100% certain it's the same drive - it's the only one I have of this type.
6-ish years ago when I bought my Quadra 700 the floppy drive was totally solid with years of caked on dust, and incapable of injecting or ejecting a disk. I stripped, cleaned, lubricated, just the usual, and it worked great afterwards.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago, and I was trying to recover some rare disks that I bought from eBay. Unfortunately they were ruined, but one in particular was in really bad shape and transferred material to the heads and left tracks on the disk. Any subsequent disk also came out of the drive with tracks on it. So I pulled it apart again and cleaned the heads. I had to scrape some of the media material off to start with because it was stuck on pretty well, then I finished with IPA and cotton buds.
Unfortunately after this treatment the drive wouldn't read disks any more. I messed with it a for a few hours before I gave up and put it back in the machine, thinking the heads were just shot ( I didn't know about the track zero sensor at the time, so perhaps it could also have been that).
Fast forward again to yesterday evening, and I was engaged in some SCSI shenanigans that resulted in no bootable volume on the hard drive. Without thinking, I found a disk tools disk and shoved it in. It was only after the happy Mac appeared on screen that I thought "Wait a minute, this drive doesn't work!".
I tried a few more bootable floppies to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and sure enough they all booted right up no problem. With an OS back on the HD, the floppy drive is working 100% normally.
How is this possible?! I am 100% certain it's the same drive - it's the only one I have of this type.
