Bad head alignment on 800k floppy drive

[Ttpilot]

I recently acquired an SE. The floppy wasn’t working, so I got it out and lubed everything and replaced the wet-cardboard eject gear, which had stripped. The drive takes in disks now, but I always get the message “this disk is unreadable by this Macintosh”. I get this same result from any floppy, including the original system disks. I inserted a blank disk and selected the “initialize” option. The heads moved, then the disk was ejected. The heads touch if the carrier is put in the loaded position, but could they be misaligned
somehow? I’ve attached a video fwiw

 

[codevonlux]

Did you move the Zero Track Sensor (ZTS) during the cleaning? If so then it is most certainly misaligned. Check Zero Track alignment in https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/superdrive-floppy-maintenance.549/page-2

I followed these steps and fixed a few 800K/1.44M drives.

 

[Ttpilot]

I don’t think I did, but I did remove the stepper motor assembly for cleaning, following instructions on several YouTube channels

 

[Ttpilot]

Did you move the Zero Track Sensor (ZTS) during the cleaning? If so then it is most certainly misaligned. Check Zero Track alignment in https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/superdrive-floppy-maintenance.549/page-2

I followed these steps and fixed a few 800K/1.44M drives.

I haven’t touched the zero track sensor, but I noticed that the heads don’t meet flat to each other in the closed position. Could that be a problem?

 

[codevonlux]

The photo does not look good. Did you bend the upper part of the head too hard when you clean the head?

Here is a photo of a working 800k drive:

 

[Ttpilot]

The photo does not look good. Did you bend the upper part of the head too hard when you clean the head?

Here is a photo of a working 800k drive:


View attachment 74173

I must have. Clumsy me vs extremely fragile computer part . Should be fun trying to straighten that

 

[codevonlux]

I did destroy one head before the same way. I is pretty much gone. Good luck.

 

[Ttpilot]

I did destroy one head before the same way. I is pretty much gone. Good luck.

Here’s another one. I’ve also got an SE FDHD, but it doesn’t have a functional hard drive. The only boot disk I’ve got is an 800k System 6 floppy. The computer reads it and starts the OS. The menu shows up on the screen; eventually it stops and says it wants to make a small correction to the disk. On my only boot disk? No way. So I don’t know if there’s a problem with the floppy or the drive