Non-Working 1.44MB Disk Drive

[Tempest]

The disk drive in my Mac Classic has always given me some trouble.  Whenever I'd insert a disk I had to use something to poke the disk in a little further or the drive wouldn't 'grab' the disk and read it.  So today when I had my Classic open to replace the hard drive I decided to clean the disk drive and see if that helped.  I took the drive out, put a tiny bit of lithium grease on the moving parts (the pins that slide in the slots, packaged it all back up and thought that would be that.  Unfortunately now the drive doesn't want to read disks.  It says that the disk isn't formatted and when you attempt to format it it always fails (no surprise there).  I honestly have no idea how I could have broken the drive as I really didn't do much to it, I'm wondering if it was on the verge of dying and this just pushed it over the edge?  I plugged in a spare 800K drive into the system and that worked just fine so it's not the Classic itself. 

Any ideas on what I could check?  Does anyone have a spare drive (Sony MP-F75W-01G) for sale to replace mine if it's truly dead?

 

[rsolberg]

Do 800k disks work in the malfunctioning drive? If so, the switch may have been pushed in during cleaning and has become stuck, identifying all disks as double density rather than high density. Also, is it now pulling the disk in properly?

 

[Tempest]

Doesn't appear to be.  Sometimes it will say the disk is unreadable and ask me to initialize it, other times it will say that the disk format is wrong and ask me if I want to format it as a one or two sided disk.  I think the mechanism is pulling in the disks right, they seem to go in and then the mechanism slowly sinks down.

So is the MP-75W-01G the only 1.44MB drive that will work in the Classic or will something like a MFD-75W-01G work?  I don't know these Sony drive model numbers at all.

 

[Unknown_K]

I have a superdrive that was giving me issues about not reading disks and wanting to format them. I took the drive mechanism out and the top drive head fell off.

 

[Tempest]

No idea what's going on with mine.  When it tries the format the disk the head actually moves so I don't think it's mechanical.  I'm guessing something is out of alignment or something of that nature.

What drive model numbers can I use with a Mac Classic?

 

[Elfen]

Did you pull out the heads or flexed them too much when moving them for cleaning?

If you did, you killed the drive by misaligning the heads. No way to fix that unless you have an oscilloscope,

 

[Tempest]

That's probably what happened then.  Probably bumped it out of alignment.  Guess I'll have to get a new one. 

What drive model numbers can I use with a Mac Classic?

 

[rsolberg]

That was just a guess on my part. All auto-inject Superdrives are interchangeable, so you won't have to match model numbers.

This might help: http://siber-sonic.com/mac/superfloppy.html

You'll want an auto inject drive.

MFD-75W-01G and MP-75W-01G are equivalent numbers, I believe. I have seen both on the same drive- one on the case, the other on the motor.

 

[Tempest]

That chart helps. I'll scour the web and see if I can find one of these cheap.