SE Floppy Drive Ejects (Rejects) All Disks - Help!

[BadGoldEagle]

It "works" but not well. Files will get corrupted after some time (that's what I've heard, but I've tried it a couple of months ago and the disk still works fine...). You need to cover the extra hole though... scotch tape does the job rather well.

And now, here's a funny story about one of my SEs that might interest you... Don't know why I didn't think of that before.

I plugged in a dodgy looking floppy drive for testing. This machine was working fine before I did that. The drive showed no sign of life. I promptly removed it and put the Mac back together, along with its known good FDD. The day after, I realised the Mac wouldn't accept any disks, it kept ejecting them. So far, it had the same symptoms as yours.

The Floppy EMU would throw some error code... I remember contacting BMOW about it and he told me that the SWIM could be bad (It was an FDHD, so no IWM). 

So, I removed the chip and installed one of my known good ones from a 1/20 I had lying around (The SE 1/20 basically an FDHD equipped with 1meg of memory and a 20mb drive). It fixed it. Yay!

Just out of curiosity, I decided to put the old one back. Switched my SE on, and oddly enough, it was reading disks fine!! How did it fix itself? I guess the board and the chip were stuck in a loop for some reason, the new chip wasn't and managed to reset the floppy state. 

That's definitely odd. And it was properly inserted too, I took it out and put it back in back in fourth 3 times in total before using a "new" chip, and before I introduced it to the new SWIM it wouldn't work.

=> You should try that, but obviously, you need another IWM... You could buy another SE on Craigslist (make sure it's not an FDHD or a Superdrive), do what you have to do with it, remove the battery and perhaps sell it back for a profit? 

 

[Themk]

It "works" but not well. Files will get corrupted after some time (that's what I've heard, but I've tried it a couple of months ago and the disk still works fine...). You need to cover the extra hole though... scotch tape does the job rather well.

I was referring to the actual drives themselves, not in using high density media as double density media

 

[ben68]

Interesting. I wonder if I just popped out the IWM chip and re-inserted it if it would fix the problem. Is there a way to continuity test the chip? or would it matter...

How do I identify the SWIM chip? I've only read about it..

Or I could buy a HD to SD converter and cut the floppy drive out of the equation altogether. 

 

[BadGoldEagle]

@Themk. Oh okay, sorry about that. :-/  But yeah you can totally use FDHD drives with non-FDHD ROMs, they just won't work as FDHDs... just as plain 800k drives.

@ben68. I tried that and it didn't work, but YMMV. You won't find a SWIM on your board. Only FDHD models have a SWIM, 800K models have an IWM. It does the same thing, it's a floppy disk controller, the only real difference is that the SWIM can handle 1.44mb media... the IWM on the SE can't. It's located right next to the two large ROM chips. The silkscreen will help you identify it.

 

[ben68]

There's an SE with unknown issues on eBay that I can get for $60 and pick up locally. Has 2 floppy drives. No keyboard, no mouse.

I'm reluctant to add more Macs to my limited living space.

 

[Themk]

Try your SE/30's floppy drive in your SE.

Also thanks BGE for the confirmation!

 

[ben68]

I'll try that - I didn't know that the SE/30 DSHD drive was backward compatible with the DSDD SE until today! 

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Yep that's the first thing to to before buying anything else. What happened to my FDHD was very peculiar, and it's most likely very uncommon.

Swap the drives and the ribbons as well. 

You can even use a later manual inject drive I think. Or is it the opposite? Probably... The Q605 has a manual inject drive, but can use the older auto inject mechanisms as well. Don't know about later PC style drives in 800k machines though...

And about that SE you mentioned... I personally wouldn't buy another troubled SE. The SE's supposed to be one of the most reliable Macs out there but when it completely fails that usually means Maxell...

 

[ben68]

I now have 3 Macs and one HD floppy that mostly works. The single HD floppy drive in the (newly acquired) SE30 doesn't read right off - I have to insert the system disk 2 or 3 times for it to read, but after that, it reads and writes without error. I re-lubed this drive, so the mechanics are pretty smooth. I think it just needs to be worked in.

Here's a bit I don't understand. I have some 800k disks formatted as bootable 6.0.8 system disks, and they can be read with my 7600 running OS 9. 

I put in a blank HD 1.44 into the SE/30 running 6.0.8, with a mostly working floppy drive, initialize it, format it, and it reads/writes fine there. I put it in the  7600/os9, and it doesn't read it. What gives? I thought the 7600 would be able to read HD floppies from OS 6.

 

[techknight]

Do disks formatted by the 7600 be read by the SE/30? 

This is a typical alignment issue of the drive. Try the vice-versa scenario. if you cannot read HD disks in the drive created by other machines, throw the drive away and replace it with another one. Unless you want to tweak on the stepper motor all day and hope you get it right.