Boot disk not working on my Mac128k

[giolicious]

I made a System 1.0 boot disk from a PowerBook 170 using a high density 1.44mb floppy diskette. It boots and works fine on my Macintosh 128k using an external Apple 3.5" drive but not on the internal floppy drive. Keeps spitting the disk out. Why? Is creating a bootable 400k disk using a high density 1.44mb floppy not compatible with the mac128k's floppy drive?

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

The 400k drive only reads 400k disks, last I checked.

 

[bigmessowires]

Creating a 400K disk on 1.44MB media is dodgy, but it usually works, at least for a while. If you can find 800K media (same as 400K) it would be much better, though.

Does the Mac 128K's internal floppy drive read other disks? Maybe try booting from your external drive, then put a blank disk in the internal drive, format it, and copy the data over. The internal floppy drive may just need to be cleaned and serviced, that's very common.

 

[snuci]

If you can boot the Mac 128k from the external drive, format other floppy in the Mac 128k and copy it to see if that works.

 

[giolicious]

Creating a 400K disk on 1.44MB media is dodgy, but it usually works, at least for a while. If you can find 800K media (same as 400K) it would be much better, though.

Does the Mac 128K's internal floppy drive read other disks? Maybe try booting from your external drive, then put a blank disk in the internal drive, format it, and copy the data over. The internal floppy drive may just need to be cleaned and serviced, that's very common.

I have already tried that on all the 400k diskettes that came with my mac128 but nothing works. It just spits them out after a few spins when I click on the Initialize button.

So a 400k formatted 1.44mb HD diskette should be fine (for a while)? Otherwise it's a hardware issue with the internal floppy disk drive? I'll open it and remove the drive again and see what I can do. I think I have done it a few years ago but can't remember.

 

[unity]

Ya, hardware issue. If you want to rule out mobo issues, you can swap the external for the internal. Otherwise a cleaning and alignment of the head may be in order.

 

[giolicious]

Ya, hardware issue. If you want to rule out mobo issues, you can swap the external for the internal. Otherwise a cleaning and alignment of the head may be in order.

Do you know any guide out there on how to align/service a 400k floppy drive?

 

[unity]

There is one out there. But I always put a floppy in and looked at how much bend there was made to the media by the head. It should be almost flat. So... disk goes in and its "clamped" by the head and compression pad above (also make sure you have a pad in the upper arm!). When its "clamped" the media should not bend too far up or down. A screw on the underside (will have to remove, move lower floppy logic board) can adjust the height. Really it should not need much of an adjustment.

The other issue can be capacitors on the drive boards.

 

[snuci]

The last issue is a missing top pad that holds the disk media down for the head to read properly.

 

[giolicious]

Hey guys thank you! I got the internal drive working again. I just cleaned the drive's head with a cotton and alcohol.

 

[unity]

Well see! Easy peasy!