exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hi

my long button internal drive is broken. It spins up and moves the head, but does not read the disk.
Is there a chance I could repair it myself?
Or shall I send it to you?
Or just buy a new one from you? And send the old in, in case you want to try to salvage it?

Georges

Gunstick wrote: ↑Sun Aug 27, 2017 11:08 pm Hi

my long button internal drive is broken. It spins up and moves the head, but does not read the disk.
Is there a chance I could repair it myself?
Or shall I send it to you?
Or just buy a new one from you? And send the old in, in case you want to try to salvage it?

Georges

Some things to bare in mind here.. They are mostly belt driven, if so it will need a new belt. Also clean the heads. A lot of long button drives were single sided so it may not read double sided disks anyway.

I tested if the disk is rotating:

Insert disk, make the drive rotate.
Remove disk, rotate the floppy a little bit.
Insert the floppy again.
Make the drive rotate. There should be a "schllllick" sound of the notch slipping into the floppy.

I heard the sound: yes the floppy rotates.

Why I didn't just watch the motor? This drive is fully encased in a metal shield. So the audio method was easier than to dismantle it.
Unfortunately I have no head-cleaning floppy disk.

Are you sure its not just the motor you can hear running ? Belt slipping can also still spin the disk. You need to open the drive and takes some images.

You can see how I cleaned the heads in this topic..
https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewt ... ?f=17&t=96