Hints/feedback on disk reading failure on Apple IIe

["IceCool@Digidude" <icecool@nospam.net>]

Ave Apple II enthusiasts!

The other day I decided to break out my good ol' Apple II with DUODRIVE and 
monitor and give it a go after some 15 years of inactivity. My Apple has an 
80column + 64K explansion card, a Practical Peripherals Graphicard and the 
duodrive controller.

Well the system boots up, but won't load any of my over 100 5'25" floppies. 
It will load some data, but it is all corrupted. I can see this because the 
raster images that appear on some utilities are garbled, and the garble 
changes if I reset the Apple and reload the same floppy. Other than that, 
the programs just crash and the Apple jumps to the internal 
assembler-monitor.

So I thought, hell, my old duodrive 1 is failing alignment, let me try with 
N.2. So I opened the duodrive case up and removed the electronics and 
inverted the mechanics (the electronics is only 1 board for both drives 
installed on drive1) and tried again: same result. I also have a nice 5'25" 
cleaning kit with isopropyl alcohol which I used but the drive's heads seem 
to be perfectly clean (I checked visually). It can't be my floppies because 
they were all good quality 3M or Verbatim floppies and I have over 100 of 
them and none work and give all the same symptoms. I tried messing with the 
speed pots, but that didn't do it, it went from loading corrupted data to 
loading nothing at all.

The apple seems to work fine as I wrote a small basic program and it runs 
fine - it must be the DAC/ADCs that are failing on the interface board or 
some other read related component. I tried heating them and cooling them, 
but that didn't change the results much.

I did think of running a diagnostic, but then again I can't load anything 
unless I can get the audio inputs to work and someone can send me a sampled 
wav of a small diagnostic program so I can record it back to tape and try it 
(I don't have a superserial card, which I may purchase). Apart from that, 
I'm out of ideas. If I have time, I'll try to give it another go. Time takes 
it's toll on capacitors or condensers and there may be some component that 
has drifted out of tolerance spitting out a lot of noise and getting the 
A/Ds to decode junk. I am thinking now of getting another disk interface 
card.

I would really like to get my Apple running again, it's part of my youth! 
Any comments are welcome!

Luke