Re: Two drives failing.....

[Polymorph <polymorph69@hotmail.com>]

On Jun 16, 9:07 pm, sirgh...@optonline.net wrote:
> Had something a bit unusual happen last night. Want to make sure I didn't overlook anything.....
>
> I have a GS with 4 drives on the smartport. two 3.5", two 5.25".
>
> Last night, BOTH 5.25" drives seem to have failed at the same time. Neither will read, although they spin up, and
> recalibrate fine.
>
> Tried connecting them in a different order, no go.
>
> Tried connecting each of them as the ONLY drive to the smart port. No go.
>
> Don't have a drive controller card to hook them to, to test the possibility of the smart port failing.
>

I'd be checking that the disk you are testing with isn't dirty. You
may have just dirtied the heads on both drives? I have a scanned doc
on my web site (http://apple2.sytes.net) that outlines the cleaning
procedure if you want to give that a try. Its pretty common for the
drives heads to become dirty, especially when attempting to read old
dusty floppies.

If the disk used for testing is known to be clean, if it were me, I'd
still be checking the cleanliness of the heads - you could just have
been incredibly unlucky to reach a peak level of dirtiness on both
drives.  :-)

Cheers,
Mike