SE superdrive not able to read 800k disks?

[ioncehadamac]

I did replace the original SE floppy with a superdrive, including the 3 roms.

It works fine only with one disk, and this is the weird thing:

1) at boot, 800k disks does not work; the drive spit them out after a couple of spins.

2) None of my disks that were readable with the previous drive (they are all 800k disks, few original disks too), are readable; formatting seems to fail for all the 800 and 1.44 disks (possible that the formatting done with a PC and an Amiga floppy drive, did ruin them; I need to find new floppy disks, but they sell only the ones with PC formatted)

3) the only disk that the drive recognize, is the HD20 prep disk; but if I insert it at boot it will be ejected; while if I boot from hard drive, it takes it and read it.

I did clean a bit the drive; it was mostly very clean, I didn't touch the heads, and just put a bit of lubricant on the joints of the carriage; so I can say that I didn't make anything that could have affect the drive.

Is there something off in the drive? If I can't read any disk with it, at this point is better t just put back the original 800K back

 

[Compgeke]

Sounds like your drive is bad. The 1.44 meg drives are able to read and write 800K disks fine (even in the 9600). Format failing on all the disks also leads to a bad drive. Whether that's dirty heads or something else I wouldn't know.

 

[ioncehadamac]

I see; so the drive is bad; but how do I figure out if it is a recoverable bad or totally bad?

The weird thing is that it read only one 800k disk; although it try to format teh disks with 2 holes as 1.44; so kudos for the effort

 

[K55]

Tbh I've fixed 18/20 of my bad floppy drives by cleaning the heads with 90 ish percent alcohol.

Just be gentle with a qtip. Any small amount of dirt can cause read errors.

 

[ioncehadamac]

Tbh I've fixed 18/20 of my bad floppy drives by cleaning the heads with 90 ish percent alcohol.

Just be gentle with a qtip. Any small amount of dirt can cause read errors.

Crossing fingers that this will fix the problem; thanks!

 

[ioncehadamac]

Sadly the qtip and alcohol did not fix the problem I guess I have to bite the bullet and accept that I can only use the 800K drive at this point.

Unless there is something else that I can try; the problem does not seem to be the mechanical part; since I did grease it up and is working as expected, both when inserting and ejecting the disk.

I was told also to check for the sensor that identify the disks; which may be defective, and this is why when I put the 800K disks it give me the prompt to format, because it think that it is a 1.44 MB?

 

[tjjq44]

I was told also to check for the sensor that identify the disks; which may be defective, and this is why when I put the 800K disks it give me the prompt to format, because it think that it is a 1.44 MB?

Yes I experienced this recently, one of my 3.5" drive on my amiga rejected my discs, it was the 800k/1.4M microswitch!!! I cleaned it and everything is fine now.

 

[K55]

Ah yeah totally forgot, thanks tjjq, there's also the two microswitches on the front, you want to clean those (I just put 99% alc on them and pressed them 100 times). Wouldn't hurt to reflow the solder joints.

If those dont work the drive will never think there's a disk inside and things get messed up.