Re: How to Use Cleaning Diskettes with Apple IIGS?

[Wayne Stewart <waynes@intergate.bc.ca>]

Matthew Carpenter wrote:

> Hello,
>
>    Today I bought a 3.5 and 5.25 Disk drive cleaning Kit from
> RadioShack(they even had new 5.25 disks).  I am hoping that they will make
> it so I can load this Dragon Wars game and format a pack of unused disks
> someone gave me.
>
>    My problem is I have no idea how I should go about using the cleaning
> kit.  It says to make the drive run for 30 seconds for both sizes (I think
> I read something about no more than 20seconds with Apple 3.5 for alignment
> reasons)..I was wondering if there might be a program to make the drive
> access the disks for a long enought period to clean the heads.

The disk cleaners I'm familiar with use a "fiber" disk that you wet with a
cleaning
solution. Having the disk spin for 3 or 4 seconds seems to do it for me. Just
about
any program that tries to read from or format the cleaning disk will run the
drive
more than long enough.

Some 5.25" cleaning disks had a piece of the plastic envelope on one side
that you
could remove for two head drives. If yours has this, it'd be better left in
as the
Apple II 5.25" drive has only one head and cleaning disks are hard on the
fiber
pad on the top.

    Wayne