SE/30 unable to read or initialize floppy disks

[fyndr]

I've recently acquired a fully-recapped SE/30, and while putting it through its paces I noticed that when I put in a floppy disk (from a pack of Verbatim DataLife MF 2HD IBM-formatted 1.44MB blank floppy disks) into the drive, it doesn't display a floppy icon and instead gives a dialog that says, "This disk is unreadable by this Macintosh. Do you want to initialize the disk?" When I proceed to initialize it as "Macintosh 1.4 MB", the dialog goes through "Initializing disk/Verifying format/Updating disk" messages, but ultimately ejects the floppy and gives a warning, "Disk initialization failed because the disk is defective!"

If I write some data to the floppy disk using a USB floppy drive and HFVExplorer in Windows 10 and then try to have the SE/30 read its contents, I get the same result. In both cases, the floppy disks are readable and writable by my LC III, but the SE/30 doesn't appear to recognize the disk as valid and fails to initialize or erase it in either case. Does the SE/30 need anything in specific to be able to process these types of floppy disks, or could this be due to a problem with the floppy drive itself? For reference the machine is running 7.5.5 and has 8 MB of RAM, although I'm not sure if that matters in this case.

 

[omidimo]

Did you give the Floppy heads a wipe with some isopropyl alcohol? I had a similar issue with my MacTV, and a dab of CRC took care of the problem.

 

[bibilit]

Very common issue.

Those drives should been lubricated properly, and as Omidimo said cleaning the heads is the very first step.

A dirty floppy disk will contaminate the heads and send this kind of error messages.

 

[fyndr]

I haven't opened up the SE/30 yet and so I have yet to clean the heads. I wanted to see about putting the Iomega Zip disk driver onto the machine first so I could back everything up from the HD and proceed from there. However it sounds like I'll have to remove the floppy drive and attend to that first.

Would 91% isopropyl alcohol and a Q-tip work fine for this?

 

[bibilit]

yes

 

[CC_333]

Hi,

That drive worked for me when I tested it, so perhaps it got knocked out of alignment during shipping? Also, if you look inside the heads, there's a spring that pulls the upper and lower heads together that seems to get weak, causing this very problem (you may find that it'll work if you press down gently on the upper head when it's trying to read something). The spring sits in the closest pair of little tabs (there's three on each head, arranged in opposing stairstep patterns), and moving it to a pair that's farther apart usually solves the problem.

If you don't want to do that, I have a working spare I could send you instead?

c

 

[fyndr]

Okay I will try to check the heads to see if I can resolve it on my end sometime in the next week or so, and post the results here once I am able to give an update.

 

[fyndr]

A quick update, I tried working again with the SE/30 a couple of days ago and saw that it was able to read and write to floppy disks correctly, regardless of whether they were authored by the LC III or external USB or were provided blank. I've checked every day since and the floppy drive appears to be working, so maybe there was some momentary issue with the heads that resolved itself? I'll be keeping an eye on it but at least for the time being it doesn't look as though the issue will happen any more.