early Macintosh floppy drive woes

[y-bot]

I scored an early Macintosh at an estate sale this weekend and I've been having fun messing around with it. It's a very early model without the 128K on the back, serial number F4190QJM001. I have 4 disks, the system disk, tour disk, MacPaint and Microsoft BASIC. At first the system disk would just eject, the Macpaint disk would work fine, the tour disk would kind of work after you had already inserted the Macpaint disk and BASIC wouldn't work. I took the computer apart (it had been apart before and has light pry marks in the seam of the case.) I accidentally damaged the drive in an attempt to clean it but I had a similar one that I bought years ago. Both are Sony and the damaged one is a model mp-f51w-03. For a few minutes the new one worked great and all my disks functioned properly, then it stopped reading disks and just ejects them. I have an external drive M0130 that appears to have an older floppy drive in it that also worked great for a few minutes and now won't. Is something killing them from sitting so long and then being used? Something else I can adjust or fix? Also interested to know what has been upgraded. I think that is the original motherboard that has been modded to 512K. Here are some pics:

http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i264/y_bot/Macintosh/DSC09627.jpg
http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i264/y_bot/Macintosh/DSC09628.jpg
http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i264/y_bot/Macintosh/DSC09629.jpg
http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i264/y_bot/Macintosh/DSC09630.jpg
http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i264/y_bot/Macintosh/DSC09631.jpg
http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i264/y_bot/Macintosh/DSC09632.jpg
http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i264/y_bot/Macintosh/DSC09633.jpg

Thanks!

 

[MacTech68]

You may have a disk that is dirty or where the media is physically breaking down, dumping dirt onto the heads.

Be careful with the heads on the drives. If you lift the top head by hand, you risk stretching the spring which will render the drive useless.

If you can get a 3.5" head cleaning disk with some cleaning fluid (usually Isopropyl Alcohol), and try cleaning them that way, rather than manually which is risky if you're not careful.

Slide the silver part of the floppy disks to the side to inspect the disk media. Any crazing or irregular patterning may indicate that the media is physically breaking down.

It's also possible that a piece of dirt on the heads of the drive is scratching the media. If you see circular (concentric) marks on the disk media, that could also be the problem.

It does look like your motherboard was an original 128K with a non-Apple upgrade to 512K. The extra address line is achieved via the 74F253 with the red wires coming from it to the motherboard.

Good luck!

 

[y-bot]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

Thank you! I'll try and track down a cleaning disk.

 

[0megman]

More likely the disks themselves have failed

 

[y-bot]

Got a cleaning disk at Frye's and both the internal and external drives are now working. Clicking some of the icons using the tour disk causes errors otherwise everything works fine.

 

[MacTech68]

Got a cleaning disk at Frye's and both the internal and external drives are now working. Clicking some of the icons using the tour disk causes errors otherwise everything works fine.

Cool. I would suggest backing up the floppies, if possible, since physically breaking down media can dump dirt back onto the heads.