1.4mb floppy ejection

[Ttpilot]

Hi all, unlike the usual problem of disks not ejecting, my SE is ejecting floppies as soon as they’re inserted. The drive snaps it in, then instantly ejects it. The screen is displaying the question mark disk icon. Anybody got an idea as to why that might be happening?

 

[irdc]

That can be because of a read error. Does that particular SE support 1.44M floppies (ie. is it an SE FDHD)?

 

[Ttpilot]

The machine is an SE, but I swapped the ROMs and drive from an SE FDHD. When I got the FDHD I used the hard drive and the floppy in my SE, along with the ROM swap. The hard drive booted up but the floppy had issues. I had messages that it wanted to repair my floppies (original System 6 disks), plus the eject gear wasn’t working. I disassembled the floppy, replaced the gear, cleaned the heads, and relubed everything. When I started it again the hard drive would spin up but not boot and it had developed the immediate floppy eject issue. I’ve left it at that because I had to leave town for a couple of weeks

BTW I stripped the gear out of the FDHD because the case is in terrible shape and it had memory issues. It looked like someone had tried to open it with a prybar

 

[irdc]

I assume you also swapped the SWIM chip?

You say you disassembled the drive. Could it be that you somehow altered the head alignment?

 

[Ttpilot]

Yes, I also swapped out the SWIM chip. As to altering the head alignment, I don’t think I did. I’ll be repeating the process on the drive to see if I screwed up

 

[irdc]

One thing to also check is if the microswitches that detect the floppy type are working correctly.

 

[Ttpilot]

One thing to also check is if the microswitches that detect the floppy type are working correctly.

Will do

 

[bibilit]

Probably the head is dirty, main reason for that kind of behavior, or the head is not able to go back and forth
Even without changing the ROM the 1.44 drive is able to read a 800k disk fine.

 

[JdM74]

While you have your drive disassembled, you may also consider a recap job. All of the floppy drives I’ve restored…all of them had at least 1 cap leak, some more. This was more evident in the external 800K drives rather than the internal ones.

In the last external 800K drive I dealt with….the drive was dead on arrival. However, after a thorough cleaning of the drive mechanism and recapping both the drive controller and drive board…it’s working as good as it did from the factory in 1986.

Some will argue that recapping a floppy drive is a waste of time…I would argue otherwise. =)