Strange problem with floppies used on PowerBook 1400cs

[sega dude]

There's a really irritating problem with floppies used on my 1400cs. Whenever I use a floppy on the 1400cs, that floppy refuses to work with my USB floppy drive and possibly other drives. It claims that it needs to be formatted, but putting it back in the 1400cs it works fine. It does the same thing with both Mac and PC formatted floppies. I haven't been able to get anything off of it because of this. What could be causing this? It still does this after a clean install of 0S 9.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The Floppy is dead, dead, dead! Get an assortment of Zip Drives and disks, I sneakernet tons of stuff across every Mac from the Plus to the Pismo, the QS'02 when it was still running, and between the Pismo and Pavilion NetBook every day.

I have no trust in the newfangled USB replacements for real FDDs, but that doesn't matter, the disks are woefully short on capacity anyway.

 

[Macdrone]

I still use the floppy myself as the old compacts like the 512 need them to do anything. Gotta have some love for them.

 

[lameboyadvance]

One could argue that up until recently, you needed them to operate a 128k/etc due to lack of SCSI port, but now that the floppy emulator has been released even I have to admit the ol' floppy is no longer needed...

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I was exaggerating of course. Floppies still have their uses, especially for initial setup and recovery situations. But for the most part, using them to transfer files from computer to computer is a waste of time.

You've still gotta have iomega guest on a floppy! [)] ]'>

 

[sega dude]

I tried a floppy used on my 1400cs on every PC with a floppy drive I own. The only two computers it worked in were my two Packard Bells, one running Windows 95 and the other running Windows 98. Every other computer I tried it in claimed that the disk was unformatted. Using my USB floppy drive on my MacBook on Lion, it says the disk is unreadable and wants initialize it.

 

[mcdermd]

When did Apple drop HFS support in OS X? Was it Lion?

 

[volvo242gt]

10.6.x, if I remember correctly. That said, my Macbook reads floppies using the LaCie USB floppy drive I have for it and the G4, but won't write to it, esssentially acting as if the disk is locked.

-J

 

[Macdrone]

I agree the 10.6 was the cutoff as they were done with all the non intel hardware at that point. 10.5.8 will read and write the floppies just fine on my eMac.

 

[mcdermd]

I thought they also dropped read support some time recently.

 

[sega dude]

When did Apple drop HFS support in OS X? Was it Lion?

Like I said in my original post, it does this with both Mac and PC formatted floppies. FAT formatted floppies don't work on my USB floppy drive after being used in the 1400cs. I read somewhere that this could be caused by misaligned heads that are writing data to the wrong part of the disk. Anyone heard of this problem?

 

[jruschme]

Misaligned heads were a common problem in the 5.25 era. I confess that I've never heard of it with a 3.5, though that seems the likely cause.

 

[bigmessowires]

Agreed. If the floppies consistently work fine in some drives but not at all in others, I would strongly suspect a head alignment problem. Tracks are laid down as a narrow concentric rings on the floppy media. If one drive is adjusted differently from another, the ring where the track data is written could end up looking like the space between rings on another drive, so it reads jibberish.

I've never attempted to re-align a floppy head, and I suspect it's not easy. Might be easier to replace the floppy drive.

 

[sega dude]

Could a misalignment have been caused by having a floppy in the drive during shipment? When I got the computer there was a floppy in the drive.

 

[gsteemso]

Could a misalignment have been caused by having a floppy in the drive during shipment? When I got the computer there was a floppy in the drive.

Doubt it. Floppy drives used to come with a disk-shaped plastic slug to put in the drive so it wouldn't get damaged in transit, and the usual workaround for having lost yours was to just keep a disk in it while you transported it.

 

[techknight]

Even if it was out of alignment, you could "blindly" tweak the alignment by adjusting the stepper servomotor on the head actuator. There is a locking screw, and you can actually physically turn the motor. this will change the alignment.

YMMV.