Macintosh SE won't read any disks

[AwkwardPotato]

I recently obtained my first 68K Macintosh, a Macintosh SE with dual 800k floppy drives. Turning it on, it boots to the blinking question mark screen, but won't read any disks. I'm almost certain that my system disk is fine; I created it with Disk Copy 4.2 on a PowerMac 6100 using this guide. I also plugged in a known working external 800k drive from an Apple IIGS, and it won't read the disk either. I've made sure to bless the system folder on the disk.

Assuming that it's an issue with the logic board, which components should I look at replacing?

Thanks!

 

[AwkwardPotato]

Now after putting in a disk, it will try to read it for a second or two and eject it, regardless of whether i use the internal or external drive. I've read that this can be a symptom of the Bourns Filters failing, but is it possible that the IWM is bad?

EDIT: I don't know what I did differently, but I can now get to a "Welcome to Macintosh" screen, and then a "System Error" dialog box appears, either "coprocessor not installed" or "illegal instruction".

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Well that's progress at least  ;D

What system did you put on that floppy? It'll do that if you're trying to boot from a system 7 disk...

Have you tried multiple disk images? There are quite a few corrupt images on the net... 

I don't think the hardware's to blame here, those SEs were quite sturdy. It's very easy to create a bad disk though... The best solution is to format the disk on the SE with system 6 but since you can't boot it, you can't do that.

 

[AwkwardPotato]

I'm using the Utilities 1 disk image for System 6.0.8, and the image boots fine in Mini vMac.

 

[AwkwardPotato]

I've used my only double density disk for the boot disk, and now the SE boots fine. I'm even able to load some software (from 1.44mb disks with tape over the hole), however the lower floppy drive will not read or write ANYTHING (cannot even initialize a disk).

In addition, I'm running into a problem where even the 800k disks will randomly become unreadable on the SE, but the PowerMac 6100 can read them just fine.

 

[Torbar]

Maybe the heads need to be cleaned?

 

[mactjaap]

And what about cleaning and lubrication?

https://youtu.be/i8K6XsUk6fk

 

[AwkwardPotato]

I'd cleaned and lubricated the drive only to find that the ribbon cable to the read/write heads was severed, right under the metal plate at the end of the head. I have now replaced the lower drive with a spare 800k drive, and now it operates almost perfectly, except all internal/external drives are unable to initialize a disk. When it gets to the verification stage, it simply says "Initialization failed!"