Re: Question mac drive

[Randy Shackelford <shack@onyx.southwind.net>]

W Stewart <waynes@intergate.bc.ca> wrote:

:> I have a mac IIcx the floppy drive didn't work the head was shot.I took the
:> head out of an apple IIgs 800kb drive and put in the mac 1.44mb drive but it
:> didn't work I think the motor was shot in the mac drive. So I put the head
:> back in the apple drive and put the circuit board form the mac drive on the
:> apple also had to use the upper carriage part of the mac drive to line up
:> with all three switches apple drive only has two.It works but it won't format
:> 1.44mb disk it will read and write them ok also read, writes and formats
:> 800kb ok.My question is it because of the 800kb head that it won't format
:> 1.44mb disk or something else.Also both drives are sony.

: Having just taken a glance at a few drives I noted that on the plastic part of
: the head assembly all 800 k drives have the same # while all 1.44 drives
: have a different #. So I'd guess that exchanging heads may solve your
: problem. That's about the only electronic part left to change over anyways.

That sounds like an awful lot of work when you consider how easy to find and
cheap the old Sony superdrives are now. It's not like the days when I pulled
an eject motor off a broken 800K to fix a superdrive since that motor ran
$70. Reseller types in the Mac forsale groups regularly offer superdrives
for $15 or less. I've accumulated about three spares myself from finding 'em
in used computer stores. 
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