Re: Platinum 5.25" drive problem

[John L <jd@logotech.i8.com>]

On Wed, 27 Jun 2001 20:39:41 +1000, "Mark Cummings"
<NOTfigjams@primus.com.au> wrote:

>No, the stepper motor does not control the drive speed, it moves the heads
>in and out. Of course I am assuming the stepper is moving the heads. This is
>normally something you can hear if you put your ear up to the drive, or open
>it up and see what it's doing when reading the disk.
>
>I would open it to get a few more clues.


I already have and it's not immediately obvious what is wrong.  I
initially suspected the head alignment was off thinking that the
stepper motor had come loose.  After further investigation, it appears
that the cause of my disk problems relate to my DuoDisk - it keeps
trashing my floppy disks rendering them unuseable.  My Platinum 5.25"
drive appears to work ok after testing it with freshly formatted 5.25"
DSDD disks and hooked up to my spare //e .

 I have already cleaned the heads of both my Duodisk drives and
adjusted the speed of both.  At various times both of the drives act
normally and will read/write data correctly to any disk.  More
frequently however, the DuoDisk drives will refuse to boot any disks
or even show a catalog on a formatted disk (using Copy II Plus booted
off a Unidisk 3.5" drive).

I noticed in the FAQ that two DuoDisk mods are recommended.   The
first one deals with the "Trashing of disks on CTRL-RESET-OA"  issue
which sounds similar to the problem I'm gaving with my DuoDisk
although my second drive is affected as well..  The second mod relates
to daisy chaining a DuoDisk on a GS - not really relevant here.  

Has anyone done the first modification mentioned above and what were
the results ?

Furthermore, is the second mod necessary ?



John