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Auto Floppy Repair Info

macuserman

Well-known member
Sick of fiddling with this, I found a listing on fleabay claiming drive was tested and fully functional. https://www.ebay.com/itm/185777193994 excitedly I messaged the seller who assured me it was fully tested read write etc. It arrived yesterday and I tossed it excitedly into my machine. And no dice wants to initialize every single disk inserted. If you try to initialize it fails. Really starting to hate these drives.
 

ironborn65

Well-known member
I've been trying in the past to align the head of floppy drives by adjusting by small increments the optical sensor. Sometimes I was able to do the job, but it was is long a boring process because everytime you have to eject the disk, adjust the position of the sensor and re insert the disk.
I am wondering if it was possible by mean of an ad-hoc software to constantly seek for track 0, so during these attempts I can adjust the the optical sensors until the floppy is able to read to read it, this would avoid the countless numbers of disk ejects.
But I don't know if it is possible to control the floppy drive in this way though the SWIM, maybe the initial seek of track 0 is implemented in the floppy drive itself and cannot be bypassed.
During the factory process they should have had some dedicated procedure, maybe a special floppy disk with only track 0 and an oscilloscope to read the flux. Ok, just wondering...
 

macuserman

Well-known member
I've been trying in the past to align the head of floppy drives by adjusting by small increments the optical sensor. Sometimes I was able to do the job, but it was is long a boring process because everytime you have to eject the disk, adjust the position of the sensor and re insert the disk.
I am wondering if it was possible by mean of an ad-hoc software to constantly seek for track 0, so during these attempts I can adjust the the optical sensors until the floppy is able to read to read it, this would avoid the countless numbers of disk ejects.
But I don't know if it is possible to control the floppy drive in this way though the SWIM, maybe the initial seek of track 0 is implemented in the floppy drive itself and cannot be bypassed.
During the factory process they should have had some dedicated procedure, maybe a special floppy disk with only track 0 and an oscilloscope to read the flux. Ok, just wondering...
I was wondering something similar, I watched a YouTube video where someone was working on a different kind of floppy drive with a different system. But they had a software program that would let you select specific tracks. Then they had a scope hooked up to a touch point on the pcb to measure the output from the head. When it was at max amplitude it was correct. Now they were doing shaft alignment not zero track but they seem to do the same thing.

That’s something I’m not clear on is why you’d want to adjust the sensor vs stepper motor orientation since they both sorta do the same thing unless I’m missing something.
 
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