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9600 Floppy Drive

Syntho

Well-known member
For some reason both of the 9600 machines I have have floppy drives that aren't working so well. They give me issues with formatting and reading diskettes all the time. Is there a direct replacement for them that are good, HIGH QUALITY floppy drives? I'm not sure that these are different than any other floppy diskette drive that you'll buy, or if they're Mac specific or what.

 

Byrd

Well-known member
They're the same floppy drive as in any other Mac of the era, auto inject.  A donor 7x00 machine should have what you need.

 

CC_333

Well-known member
No, the 9600 uses manual inject drives.

Otherwise, I agree. Any Power Mac (particularly PCI-based ones) ought to have a drive you can use.

A G3 might be good though, as I believe they're slightly more common nowadays than the earlier models.

c

 

Syntho

Well-known member
I'm looking on Ebay and it's hard to narrow down what to look for. When I type 'Mac Floppy drive' I only get a few results. Maybe I should post something in the Trade forum...

 

Franklinstein

Well-known member
If you can find one of those cleaner floppy diskettes, you may want to try that before ruling a drive unserviceable. If it still has problems after a cleaning, it may be damaged or it may simply be super filthy; I've had many drives that were so full of dust that a disk couldn't be inserted fully, including one drive that someone apparently decided to use as a repository for four (long-expired) credit cards. It's usually pretty easy to take the top off one of those drives to check on the dirt level.

Apple used special drives in their computers, all of which shared the same single connector which has about half the pins of a PC floppy drive. So you won't be able to grab just any random drive to stick in your 9600.

There were three suppliers (that I know of) for the manual inject floppy drives for desktops: Mitsubishi, Sony, and Panasonic. The Mitsubishi units are by far the most common, Sony less so, and Panasonic drives showed up toward the end of the floppy drive era ('97ish, so usually in 86/9600s and beige G3s) and seemed to displace the other two makes. You'll never know what make a particular drive is unless you remove it from a computer: they all look the same from the front and mostly sound the same in operation, too. They're also all interchangeable, so as long as a drive is from a Mac and has the black plastic flap on the front, you can use it seamlessly in your 9600. You can use an old auto-inject drive if you want/need to, but the bezel won't fit properly.

 

Syntho

Well-known member
I ordered a cleaning kit. It says to access the drive for 15 seconds, but in DOS. What procedure would you use with a Mac?

 

Franklinstein

Well-known member
TechTool (search the Garden or Repository) has a button to clean the floppy drive with the cleaner disk. Otherwise, just put the cleaning fluid on the disk per the instructions, stick the disk in the drive, and tell it to format when it says "this disk is unreadable." It'll throw an error and spit the disk out, so just do this a couple times and that should be enough to get the worst of any dirt off of the heads.

 
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