[Coco] Another disk question.

[Bill Gunshannon]

________________________________________
From: Coco [coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] on behalf of Gene Heskett [gheskett at shentel.net]
Sent: Sunday, March 19, 2017 11:40 AM
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Subject: Re: [Coco] Another disk question.

On Sunday 19 March 2017 11:10:07 Bill Gunshannon wrote:

> Well, I have made some headway (thanks Bob Gault) with my
> 5.25" drives.  For whatever reason many of them were in fact
> rotating very fast. Some had strobe patterns on the spindle
> confirming this.
>
> Next question.
>
> I would like to convert most of my stuff to 3.5" as they
> are much  more reliable (at least from my experience).  I have
> probably two dozen drives of various makes and ages. two of them
> work perfectly.  The rest seem to never appear "ready".

Can you hear them moving? They also suffer carriage stiction just like
the 5.25's from dry dirty rods, and worse, the grease on the head motors
lead screws seems to harden in place. Clean them both up nice and shiny
and re-lube with light grease. Good for 5+ years in a clean environment,
just long enough to forget. :)

Some may have a teeny photocell rigged to sense the edge of the disk or
the dropped state of the disk carriage.  It could fail, but I've never
seen one knocked out of place.  Yet.

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More data.  I have gotten them to be recognized on the COCO
(well, some of them.)  But a DSKINI steps thru all the tracks and
then returns "IO ERROR".  If I put the same drive on a Model 4P
and try to run format it just keeps asking for me to insert a disk.

The two that work are fine on both systems.

Additional info:
 The two that work are:
   TEAC FD-235HF A114-U5
   MITSUMI D359T6

The ones that don't work are:
  Other modesl of the TEAC 235HF
  Other models of MITSUMI
  EPSON
  SONY
  Panasonic
  ALPS

ANy more suggestions?

bill