Macintosh II Floppy Drive Not Powering Up.

[macuserman]

I'm trying to get a functional floppy in my Mac II and so far it's not working out very well, I have two 800k drives but neither one of them seems to do anything when I insert a floppy, no motor action of any kind just nothing. I'm not sure since I don't have any way of testing the 800k drives outside of this machine most of my stuff is 1.4MB, but it seems odd that it wouldn't even try to read the disk at all. Has anyone had an experience troubleshooting the Mac II floppy circuit at all? Starting to think this may be a board issue.

 

[macuserman]

Well I just remembered I have a Floppy EMU somewhere and I dug it out and it works fine with the Mac II, so I guess I have two completely dead 800K drives, drat, any ideas on how to resurrect drives that do nothing? Not much about that online, mostly tips for cleaning and adjusting which isn't terribly helpful at this stage.

 

[bibilit]

Are you sure the upper carriage is falling down when the floppy Disk is inserted ? Are the micro switches pushed down ?

 

[macuserman]

Are you sure the upper carriage is falling down when the floppy Disk is inserted ? Are the micro switches pushed down ?

That's a good suggestion, I'll check the switches and make sure the cage is full seating when it has a disk in. I"ll report back!

 

[nekonoko]

I've had that issue before with dirty microswitches; some contact cleaner and then exercising the switches cleared it up. It's pretty easy to verify with a multimeter if they're working or not.

 

[macuserman]

Are you sure the upper carriage is falling down when the floppy Disk is inserted ? Are the micro switches pushed down ?

This was it! When the cage was dropping down the little tab on the microswitches was not being depressed fully, I was able to tweak the little metal arm on the switch and I've now got one working drive and one complaining of disk initialization. So some huge progress, thanks for that tip, this is the first time I"ve had that issue, on the drives I've been servicing.

 

[bibilit]

Glad i was able to help