Hi all, my Apple IIe floppy drives have stopped reading/writing after using a couple of new old stock floppy disks. This has happened previously with some old disks but a good head clean gets it back up and reading/writing. This time nothing has worked. Sadly I tried a spare drive and its suffered the same fate, has anyone else been in the same situation that can offer solutions?
Thanks in advance!
Did you by chance unplug or connect drives or the controller while the system was powered on?
I would suspect the Disk ][ card here. How many drives do you have, and have you tried swapping Drives 1 and 2, or only running with one drive connected?
Have only 1 drive here, everything was off before plugging in, definitely the read/write head issue as it failed to write to the new disk then stopped reading all my known working disks. I tried cleaning the head inside with cotton tip which didn't help. I have a cleaning disk and utility but drive wont read so will try look for a 2nd drive to use to run the clean program.
Could mould or dust from a floppy disk damage the read /write head permanently?
This is very unlikely. Cleaning the head using alcohol will take care of this.
Apologies for the incomplete message above - my mobile gave me an error, I did not realise it posted just the first line of the message!
What I wanted to say was: the cleaning utility won't give you any better result than manual clean. But you said you also tried with another drive and that didn't work either? If that's the case, maybe the drive controller inside the apple? Did you try re-seating it?
Does the head "rattle" when you power the machine on? I had an intermittent issue on one of my drives where the flat cable failed at the crimping terminal - it would come and go whenever I was moving the drive around. Just wondering if you had to use the same cable for the two drives?
Tried manual cleaning of the head and still failed to read , will check the cables inside, sadly looking more like a damaged head.
Ive actually ordered the booti card from a member here David_M once I receive it hopefully will do away with the need for the floppy as most stuff I use is prodos and can setup 4 drives ive been told :-)
thanks again for all your help
The weird part is this:
"Sadly I tried a spare drive and its suffered the same fate"
It's hard to imagine a floppy disk that is damaged in some way such that it is damaging drive heads on drive, much less on multiple drives?
I'd think cable/card are more likely if the problem is on multiple drives...
That said, the Booti does look like a nice piece of kit. ;-)
Good Luck!