Polymorph wrote:
On Jun 5, 11:25 am, Boot Zero <ap...@bidlink.net> wrote:Hey, I have an Apple //e enhanced, which has recently been brought back into service. Upon initial use, both floppy drives worked, and I was able to copy some disks via ADT. After a few hours of intermittent copying, drive 1 (of a Duo-disk) was throwing errors. Disks that used to boot stopped booting. Drive 2 in the duo still worked. I purchased a stand-alone 5 1/4 floppy, that worked fine for a while, then had the same problem. First it reads, then it throws errors, then it won't boot. Bought another Duo-disk on E-bay. Drive 2 was working, so I removed it and installed it into my old Duo-disk unit, giving me 2 working drives. After some hours of intermittent use, drive 1 started throwing errors. Moving to drive 2, it worked fine for a while, then the same result. Before all drives died, I did a speed test using Copy2plus. On the drives that were working, they showed normal speeds (198-202ms). On the failing drives, the speeds are all over the place. STarting at around 225, then dropping to almost zero, then back up to 300 or so. Any idea what might be causing this? Any clues as to what was needs to be replaced? Any suggestions welcome -BZAnother possibility is that if the disks you are trying to boot from are dusty/dirty, it may be that you are simply dirtying the heads in all the drives that you place the disks in. You may need to clean the disks (and now the heads of your drives) before you can get them working again. At this point I'll hand over to MJM, because he is the master at cleaning/reviving 5.25" disks. I have a scanned document on my website that details the procedure for cleaning the heads on a Disk ][ drive: http://apple2.sytes.net/Floppy_Maintenance/index.html
I occasionally run across very dirty/moldy/flaky 5.25" disks, and I try to read them only on one sacrificial drive that is cleaned often and never used with "good" disks to avoid mold infection. They are usually read only once or twice in order to make copies onto good diskettes. If you do happen to have a bunch of "bad" diskettes, I recommend this approach so that you no longer have to contend with "bad" diskettes. There are enough problems with computers without having to worry about your media. ;-) -michael AppleCrate: An Apple II "blade server"! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."