Bricking a floppy disk drive

[jessenator]

Didn't know quite where to put this, so Peripherals it is!

So a while ago I took possession of some floppies and a nice disk holder. Due diligence led me to destroy the data on the disk. I deviated from just simply physically destroying the disk, I would employ ...other methods. I ended up running a HDD rare-earth magnet over the disk first then checking it in the floppy drive. I am fairly positive that was a fatal error.

Was that enough to destroy the drive itself?

Flash forward a couple of weeks. In attempting to write Disk Tools floppies all I get are either error -72 or -80...going through about 4 disks before thinking I should stop. Moving to my beige G3, I wrote the disk image first time out no problem. I go to boot on my PowerWave (where the drive in question is mounted), and I get nothing but a frozen happy Mac and pulses from the drive, longer and longer apart, then nothing.

Is there any recourse at this point, or is the drive well and truly bricked?

 

[beachycove]

It is hard to see how a bad floppy could cause a bad drive, beyond dirt/ disintegration of the floppy plastics contaminating the heads (I've had that happen).

Have you serviced the drive following instructions in the wiki?

 

[jessenator]

Well, what I think might've happened was that the center spindle catch (i don't know what its actual name is) on the disk got magnetized by the strong hdd magnet and did something.

But I'll take a look at the wiki. I did give it a thorough cleaning and it worked fine before this incident.

 

[beachycove]

I recently had a whole box of floppies in my hands that had gone bad in such a way as to bork a floppy drive repeatedly, one after another. I can only assume that the floppy disks were disintegrating or "shedding," as a quick clean of the heads cured the problem each time. It wasn't dust, as they were well protected in a plastic disk box kept in a drawer, but it might have been moisture that caused the trouble....

As all this happened repeatedly, and as the machine was a Classic II, I soon got tired of the disassembly required. The upshot was that, in the end, I just taped a coffee filter to a scrap floppy (metal shield removed), wet the filter with alcohol, inserted the thing in the drive with the machine turned off, removed it with a paper clip, and presto, that was enough: the drive worked again. It's been good ever since. The box of offending floppies, for their part, went out next day in the trash.

 

[jessenator]

Interesting. I'll have to try that, as I don't have much to lose.

Incidentally, I can't find an apparent p/n or model number on the drive that came with my powerwave. Nothing that matched this list anyway: https://siber-sonic.com/mac/superfloppy.html

It has a Sony control chip in the board, but no other ID that I know of.

And of course, as it's essentially an 8500/tsunami-based board, my auto inject drives don't work.

Some pics of the FDD