Dead Internal Floppy Drive

[jonathan]

I inserted a floppy disk into my (recently resurrected) Plus' internal floppy disk drive, the drive then made a short "humph" sound, and thereafter died ...

After manually ejecting the disk with a pin, further attempts at inserting a floppy are greeted with no sound or movement or more "humph" sounds whatsoever. Methinks it is dead.

Here's the youtube video: http://youtu.be/E9r6pXpyR6w

What should I do? Take apart the Plus and clean the drive (by following these awesome instructions over at:

http://www.vintagemacworld.com/400kflop.html)?

 

[techknight]

those instructions are only good for the 400k drive. the 800k drives are vastly different. either a sensor switch went bad, or the control board shit the bed.

 

[jonathan]

those instructions are only good for the 400k drive. the 800k drives are vastly different.

Right, I'll use this instead:

http://68kmla.org/wiki/Floppy_Drive_Lubrication

 

[techknight]

yea, good practice, but this only fixes the inject/eject issues. Since yours appears to be ejecting/injecting just fine, I am leaning more towards the push-switch that detects when a floppy is inserted.

get some contact cleaner/deoxit and spray/work it into the disk sensor. Then it might be ok?

I dont have a drive right in front of me, but the push button type sensor is on the front left corner of the drive, youll see the plastic finger sticking up when the disk is inserted, it pushes it down. makes contact and tells the drive a disk has been inserted.

Since your eject motor isnt ejecting, or nothing is happening, the drive electronics isnt sensing a disk being picked up.

Quick check for this is while the disk is inserted, jump across the solder points where the push button switch is located, you should see the disk motor spin up and attempt to read the disk IF its bad. I think there is a sensor on both sides. One is the write protect, and one is the disk sense.

 

[jonathan]

Yeah i think there is something going on with the push switch in the left corner of the drive:

It stays down after I manually remove a floppy by ejecting it with a paper clip.

This needs to be cleaned ...

 

[jonathan]

FIXED!

Here are my observations/notes:

1. used a handy, long-handled XTD-15XL Xcelite T-15 Torx screwdriver to get at the screws behind the top handle of the Plus case;

2. after sliding the Plus case apart, popped three cables off of the vertical power supply board, also popped off the floppy drive ribbon cable;

3. removed three phillips screws from the outside side of the power supply board, unscrewed the ground cable, and slid the board off of the chassis;

4. slid the mother board out;

5. removed five torx T-15 screws connecting the chassis to the front plastic Plus case and popped it out;

6. removed four phillips screws under the drive cage connecting to the chassis ;

7. removed four zinc phillips screws on the side of the drive cage connected to the drive itself and popped the drive out;

8. swapped out the old SONY MFD-51W-03 and in with the new one (interestingly, the old drive was also labeled a MP-F51W-03, while the new one, which came from a Mac SE was labeled a MP-F51W-23).

9. followed the reverse order to put the parts back together, and DONE!

Much thanks to fellow 68kmla'r Scott Baret for hooking me up with the replacement Sony MFD-51W-03!!!