[Coco] drive hastles

[Chester A. Patterson]

Oh I cleaned them allright! Got in there with Q-tips and 98% ethanol and
went to town. Plenty of gunk. All gone now, but I guess maybe the old disks
WANT some of the gunk there in the first place. Wish I had that old drive
testing disk and MS-DOS software we used to use at Howard Medical to check
out the big black full size mousetrap drives.

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Ostrom [mailto:smostrom at mn.rr.com]
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 9:23 PM
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [Coco] drive hastles

Chet, I mentioned this a few weeks ago.  Please don't assume that your 5.25"
drives are bad until you have tried to clean them.  I have transferred
literally thousands of Coco diskettes to my Cloud-9 hard drive system.
Every once in awhile, I'll run into a bad diskette where the magnetic media
has started to scale off the plastic.  It sounds almost like you are running
a piece of sandpaper in the drive.  Whenever this happens, my drive dies.  I
get I/O errors, and even looking at previously good diskettes give the same
errors.  Can't format, may be able to read parts of the directory, maybe
none.  Running a cleaning diskette in the drive has always cured the
problem.  I just saw one on eBay tonight for about $5 plus $5 shipping.  I
have about three of these because they are not made any more.  You usually
get a bottle of solution - maybe alcohol based?  Plus you get  a 5.25"
diskette that has a window punched in it to apply the cleaning solution.
The disk inside the diskette cover has a fairly rough white surface that
absorbs the cleaning solution.  Just add solution, place diskette in drive,
and type almost any disk command, such as DIR in RSDOS.  The drive will spin
a few seconds, and the drive heads will be cleaned.  (Of course, if you've
already tried this, your drives went belly up !! )

-- Steve --
Chester A. Patterson wrote:

>Hi,
>
>My three 5.25" floppies went belly up (I/O error) Another 5 that I bought
at
>junk stores don't work. Didn't really expect them to work, desperation I
>guess. One original 3.5" 720k and several 1.44M appear fine. ALL my OS9
boot
>disks are 5.25" 35 and 40 track. Fortunately I have most of my system files
>on 3.5". I hope they read OK!
>
>How do I poke Extended ADOS3 to work with 80 tracks? Then I must somehow
>make a 3.5" OS9 boot disk, boot up, make my ST-225 bootable again, and
>continue with life working exclusively with 3.5" floppies. I'm trying to
get
>my rig up and running smoothly after over 12 years and problems just keep
>getting in the way!
>
>Thanks for help and suggestions!
>
>/Chet
>Costa Rica
>
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