How to repair a Floppy drive

[Greenslade]

I have five floppy drives and none of them work They all have the light on all the time.The cabal is in the right way.See photo 2412 i understand you have to take the top plate off, but it does not want to come off What causes the light to stay on?. The only one that has been working is working again after changing the cabal.I can see why 2415 does not work as there are pins missing

 

[ty_ger]

I doubt that there are pins missing. They probably just weren't needed for that design.

I fix floppy drives by buying a new one. Unless you have all the time in the world, not worth the hassle, I think.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Just must begine work from bottom.

 

[68Olds]

I did a google search for floppy drive service repair and got several video hits. You might want to watch a few to see if you want to try servicing some drives yourself. Here is one example of what I found.

 

[Frick]

I have five floppy drives and none of them work They all have the light on all the time.The cabal is in the right way.See photo 2412 i understand you have to take the top plate off, but it does not want to come off What causes the light to stay on?. The only one that has been working is working again after changing the cabal.I can see why 2415 does not work as there are pins missing

Flip the ribbon cable. Pretty common with floppy disks.

 

[Chrispy_]

So much nostalgia.
No, wait, nostalgia isn't the right word. Contempt was the word I was looking for.
Floppy drives evoke no fond memories, only those of anger, anguish, annoyance, and tedium

 

[jak_2456]

I bought a Sony floppy drive from a vendor at Vintage Computer Festival Midwest a while back. I wasn't able to test it at the show, but it was completely dead when I tried it at home. I tried several different PCs, different cables, and even tried reflowing the power connector joints; nothing worked. If the cable was upside-down, the activity light would be solid; it wasn't even when I tried it with the cable upside-down. Maybe I'll try reflowing every single joint on the PCB if I really want to get it working or use the videos that @68Olds suggested. I wasn't that angry that someone sold me a dead drive; it was only about $7.

 

[68Olds]

So much nostalgia.
No, wait, nostalgia isn't the right word. Contempt was the word I was looking for.
Floppy drives evoke no fond memories, only those of anger, anguish, annoyance, and tedium

I totally agree with that sentiment!

 

[Dr. Dro]

Way above your pay grade, if you have to ask. Complex mechanical device. Grab an USB floppy drive for 10 quid on Amazon mate, your time is worth more than what you'd spend to fix a single one of these even if it was an easy job

 

[R-T-B]

Floppies are also reaching the age where most of them recorded in their prime will have lost their magnetism and failed, just FYI. Of course some still work, but don't count on it (never count on floppies anyways).

 

[Frick]

Way above your pay grade, if you have to ask. Complex mechanical device. Grab an USB floppy drive for 10 quid on Amazon mate, your time is worth more than what you'd spend to fix a single one of these even if it was an easy job

I did some googling to reinforce my memory, but a constant light usually just means the ribbon cable is the wrong way. I do remember having drives with the cutout bit of the slot being in the wrong way so I had to force the cable in what felt like the wrong way, but it was the right way.

 

[R-T-B]

I did some googling to reinforce my memory, but a constant light usually just means the ribbon cable is the wrong way. I do remember having drives with the cutout bit of the slot being in the wrong way so I had to force the cable in what felt like the wrong way, but it was the right way.

I have memories of this as well.

 

[Dr. Dro]

If it's just that then simple enough, I guess I jumped the gun and presumed that the "basics" were already attempted since it's 5 drives and all

 

[freeagent]

In 2012 I left a storage company that I had been at for about 4-5 years. Their software that we ran the business from was written in Pascal, and we did our daily backup to floppy. When Staples stopped carrying them we were pretty hooped. We had to reuse old ones that sometimes worked, worked fine, or were completely unreliable. Oki Data dot matrix to bang out leases and whatever else that we needed to print out was done on an XP machine that was indeed connected to the internet.

Man were those owners cheap lol.. but that's how you stay rich.

 

[Frick]

If it's just that then simple enough, I guess I jumped the gun and presumed that the "basics" were already attempted since it's 5 drives and all

To be fair that is something you'll have to know. Even Google has it as a first page result, but "insert the cable the wrong way up" isn't an obvious solution these days.

 

[Greenslade]

I doubt that there are pins missing. They probably just weren't needed for that design.

I fix floppy drives by buying a new one. Unless you have all the time in the world, not worth the hassle, I think.

I have a external one ,but i am converting Amiga disks so i can play them on WinUAE with Gresweazile.I have converted most of them.But the the drive has packed up again.

Just must begine work from bottom.

It looks a long job to get the, five of them working again.I can,t be-leave all five have packed up.

Flip the ribbon cable. Pretty common with floppy disks.

I did a google search for floppy drive service repair and got several video hits. You might want to watch a few to see if you want to try servicing some drives yourself. Here is one example of what I found.

It looks a big job.

Floppies are also reaching the age where most of them recorded in their prime will have lost their magnetism and failed, just FYI. Of course some still work, but don't count on it (never count on floppies anyways).

Yes i know from my experiences of trying to convert them to play on WinUAE .I have got more than i expected to get anything off the disks.
very few have game,s on them.

So much nostalgia.
No, wait, nostalgia isn't the right word. Contempt was the word I was looking for.
Floppy drives evoke no fond memories, only those of anger, anguish, annoyance, and tedium

I bought a Sony floppy drive from a vendor at Vintage Computer Festival Midwest a while back. I wasn't able to test it at the show, but it was completely dead when I tried it at home. I tried several different PCs, different cables, and even tried reflowing the power connector joints; nothing worked. If the cable was upside-down, the activity light would be solid; it wasn't even when I tried it with the cable upside-down. Maybe I'll try reflowing every single joint on the PCB if I really want to get it working or use the videos that @68Olds suggested. I wasn't that angry that someone sold me a dead drive; it was only about $7.

From my experience of using a floppy drive for all this, i am with you there they seem very unreliable but of course they are very old.The smallest pile failed to get them ti work ,the pile next to them had stuff on them the third pile i have to check.It has been a long haul I recommend *FluxMyFluffyFloppy*for converting them,you can also do it Command Prompt.

 

[Chrispy_]

From my experience of using a floppy drive for all this, i am with you there they seem very unreliable but of course they are very old.

The problem with floppies is that they were unreliable and easily corrupted even when they were new - with the limited capacity making them a true ball-ache when one of your 50 floppies for an install had a bad sector which was often enough to make people tolerate even the abysmal Iomega Zip disks or deal with the headaches of CD-R and CD-RW

I bought a USB external as a backup just in case I needed to read floppies about 20 years ago and I don't think I actually ever used it. Even on 33.6k dial-up the internet was already faster and more useful than a floppy drive by the time I was thinking of never touching a floppy drive ever again.

If I still had to deal with floppy drives these days, I'd get one of those floppy emulators that plugs into a 34-pin internal floppy header, but has a USB port and driver software that lets you convert floppies to folders on a FAT-formatted USB flash drive. 2900 floppy disk images on a single 4GB USB drive? Yes please. Automated disk changing and throughput 60-70x faster than a physical FDD? What's not to like?

 

[jak_2456]

The problem with floppies is that they were unreliable and easily corrupted even when they were new - with the limited capacity making them a true ball-ache when one of your 50 floppies for an install had a bad sector which was often enough to make people tolerate even the abysmal Iomega Zip disks or deal with the headaches of CD-R and CD-RW

I bought a USB external as a backup just in case I needed to read floppies about 20 years ago and I don't think I actually ever used it. Even on 33.6k dial-up the internet was already faster and more useful than a floppy drive by the time I was thinking of never touching a floppy drive ever again.

If I still had to deal with floppy drives these days, I'd get one of those floppy emulators that plugs into a 34-pin internal floppy header, but has a USB port and driver software that lets you convert floppies to folders on a FAT-formatted USB flash drive. 2900 floppy disk images on a single 4GB USB drive? Yes please. Automated disk changing and throughput 60-70x faster than a physical FDD? What's not to like?

You don't get the lovely sound of an FDD seeking and reading! That's part of the charm.

 

[Greenslade]

The problem with floppies is that they were unreliable and easily corrupted even when they were new - with the limited capacity making them a true ball-ache when one of your 50 floppies for an install had a bad sector which was often enough to make people tolerate even the abysmal Iomega Zip disks or deal with the headaches of CD-R and CD-RW

I bought a USB external as a backup just in case I needed to read floppies about 20 years ago and I don't think I actually ever used it. Even on 33.6k dial-up the internet was already faster and more useful than a floppy drive by the time I was thinking of never touching a floppy drive ever again.

If I still had to deal with floppy drives these days, I'd get one of those floppy emulators that plugs into a 34-pin internal floppy header, but has a USB port and driver software that lets you convert floppies to folders on a FAT-formatted USB flash drive. 2900 floppy disk images on a single 4GB USB drive? Yes please. Automated disk changing and throughput 60-70x faster than a physical FDD? What's not to like?

Yes i keep hearing about them being unreliable even when they first came out.Although i am old enough to have used them back in the day,i have only recently started using them.I bought some disks a couple of years ago.At the time I thought i could use them on Windows.It is only when i saw that they could be converted with the Greaseweazile on you tube.I have a external drive which i bought a couple of years ago.I got one of those GoTek drives a some time ago,which i have never used.I will be able to put it to good use now that i have converted the Amiga disks. All told i spent £35 on these disks.

 

[AUTOEXEC.BAT]

Way above your pay grade, if you have to ask. Complex mechanical device. Grab an USB floppy drive for 10 quid on Amazon mate, your time is worth more than what you'd spend to fix a single one of these even if it was an easy job

Usb floppy's are crap. I have one of them. Giving fake bad sectors at format, weird filenames, slow read etc.
When i put them in the normal floppy drive, they all work fine.

 

[Greenslade]

Usb floppy's are crap. I have one of them. Giving fake bad sectors at format, weird filenames, slow read etc.
When i put them in the normal floppy drive, they all work fine.

I just wish my five floppy drives worked. I can understand why the one on the photo does not work thou with all those pins missing

 

[AUTOEXEC.BAT]

I just wish my five floppy drives worked. I can understand why the one on the photo does not work thou with all those pins missing

What is that black cable that comes out the floppy drive? Normal you have 34 Pin ribbon cable and 4pin power.

 

[Greenslade]

What is that black cable that comes out the floppy drive? Normal you have 34 Pin ribbon cable and 4pin power.

Thats what i was going to ask on here I can,t remember where the drive came from

Flip the ribbon cable. Pretty common with floppy disks.

All the cabals i, have a notch on them so you can only fit them one way.

 

[Frick]

All the cabals i, have a notch on them so you can only fit them one way.

I had a floppy on which that was the wrong way up, so I had to force the cable in the "wrong" way.

 

[Greenslade]

I doubt that there are pins missing. They probably just weren't needed for that design.

I fix floppy drives by buying a new one. Unless you have all the time in the world, not worth the hassle, I think.

You are right there ,its working.what is the lead coming out of it for?The number of disks that say they are not bootable and yet check 100%