How to repair a Floppy drive

[Chrispy_]

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%

Not bootable might be because you're using a USB floppy controller that either can't emulate boot functionality on a modern UEFI PC or simply lacks the BIOS support required to do so.

 

[Greenslade]

Not bootable might be because you're using a USB floppy controller that either can't emulate boot functionality on a modern UEFI PC or simply lacks the BIOS support required to do so.

I get your point there, thanks for that Chrispy
On some disks i get a blue or Orange screen and it says HALT2.

 

[Frick]

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%

So you plugged it in the other way round?

Also it would really help if you posted a picture of the actual cable you're wondering about. I do have a memory of seeing those cables on floppy drives before, but I'm not sure.

 

[Greenslade]

So you plugged it in the other way round?

Also it would really help if you posted a picture of the actual cable you're wondering about. I do have a memory of seeing those cables on floppy drives before, but I'm not sure.

There is only one way to put it in there ,as it has a notch on it as in the photo.Thats not the one i am using.i am using the one with the twist in it.

 

[A Computer Guy]

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

IOMega ZipDisk has entered the chat...

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.

They have/had USB ones too. I still have one that's a double speed from about 15 years ago.

 

[vigor]

I just woke up. What year is this?

 

[Chrispy_]

IOMega ZipDisk has entered the chat...

IOMega ZipDisk already entered the chat on page 1

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

Maybe calling them abysmal is unfair - I hated them for their speed, or rather total lack of it. Even though they were technically faster than floppies they were barely faster. I feel like it took 45-60 minutes to fill a zip disk. All they really achieved was saving you the hassle of swapping disks, but it still took FOREVER to install stuff from, or save large files to them.

I had a 4x CDRW drive within the same year of first using Iomega Zip disks at university, and those things held 3x as much data at almost 6x the speed and around a quarter the cost of a 250MB Zip Disk. Iomega zip died off almost overnight for that very good reason!

 

[Greenslade]

IOMega ZipDisk has entered the chat...


They have/had USB ones too. I still have one that's a double speed from about 15 years ago.

All done finished them with the drive with the missing pins on the drive The smallest pile are the ones with stuff ,not a lot of games thou.At least it is done nowI have got anther drive working now,It is out of my £1 pound Sony Vaio That,s my next project getting either 98se or ME on there.