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| Author | Macintosh SE - Both Floppy Drives Dead (Read 44496 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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68k4life
4 MB  Posts: 5 System 7 Newcomer! 
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on: July 11, 2024, 07:13
Hiya! I purchased an SE with dual 800k FDDs (and an aftermarket internal 50MB HDD) and both FDDs are totally dead. I can't even insert a disk, it won't let me. They make absolutely no attempt to accept the disks and do nothing at boot. What would be the likely culprit, and how difficult is it to repair these drives? Thanks! EDIT: Got at least one floppy drive working, though ejecting is a little wonky. I might've just misaligned the drives slightly when reinstalling them. On a side note, the HDD died right before I got the FDD working and it has some pretty neat 80s/90s medical software that I can't find online. Any suggestions on how I can resurrect it enough to get the data off it? |
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Last Edit: July 11, 2024, 09:00 by 68k4life
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #1 on: July 11, 2024, 12:44
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Fixing floppy drives is mostly just fine detailed nut and bolt work. This video guide covers repairing an Apple 800k external floppy. Once removed from the case the external and internal drives are the same drive, so this might be a good place to start. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pGhwtyFG2I>. I find Adrain's digital basement tear downs and fix ups to be pretty easy to follow. At least watching the video will give you a sense of how involved the process is. An internet search for "repair Apple 800k floppy drive" will turn up a long list of sites with more information.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023
Reply #2 on: July 11, 2024, 18:04
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Congratulations on the acquisition! You may want to invest into a BlueSCSI WiFi for your SE in the long term, so you can transfer stuff via network instead of floppy drives? A working floppy drive is a life-saver though. Don't discard them. As wove said, those floppy drives are probably fixable. If its eject mechanism is wonky, it's probably the little gear driving it that is broken. There's 3D printed replacement gears for that readily available and it'll be good for another two decades :-) It's an easy procedure - I'm NO hardware tinkerer and I managed to do it on my SE. Also as a first attempt, try to clean it with some cotton wabs and pure alcohol - see videos on YouTube to get an idea on how it is done. This made my SE's floppy drive reading floppies in again! As for the hard disk, how did it die? Does it still spin up? Does it get recognized when trying to boot up or does the Mac throw a question mark?
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68k4life
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4 MB Posts: 5 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #3 on: July 11, 2024, 22:18
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The HDD stopped making noise and I get a question mark. I’ve got one of the floppy drives working, sorta. More work is needed.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #4 on: July 12, 2024, 06:46
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Sorta working. How? If I may ask?  Can you now boot from a floppy disk, e.g. like this one? When you run Drive Setup, does the HDD show up ? If not, does running Disk First Aid on the same disk help to get the drive recognized?
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68k4life
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4 MB Posts: 5 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #5 on: July 12, 2024, 23:41
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One of them reads and writes from disks, but after a lot of disk swaps it starts to slow down/struggle to eject. After waiting for a bit it works fine again, and I haven't had this problem at all today. It could even be down to me using 1.44MB diskettes with the hole on the right side taped over. My PowerBook 520C reads and writes these as 800k disks fine (and the SE reads/writes to them fine as well) but the PowerBook can't fully eject them with the thin tape, I have to grab tweezers to finish the job. The HDD does not show up in drive setup and Disk First Aid doesn't do anything. When the machine first arrived it booted to a question mark but after a few restarts it booted fine to System 6.0.8, so I ran the Disk First Aid program that came on the HDD just to check it out, and it said it was fine then. I can hear the HDD spin up, but it doesn't make any other noises and it stops after a little bit. It was in use in a medical environment (looked like maybe a nicu from what I saw, no patient records on there thankfully) and it had some really interesting software on there that I would like to archive.
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•_indigo_•
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4 MB Posts: 4 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #6 on: September 23, 2024, 21:08
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I've been learning a lot about these old Floppy drives since I acquired a few Mac SE's a year or so ago. Seems they tend to suffer from the same Capacitor problems that the logic boards did, and so often they need to be re-capped. After that, the most common problem with ejecting is the so-called 'Cheese Gear', a small gear in the eject mechanism that was made with a kind of plastic that has proven to deteriorate quickly. Modern replacements are available pretty cheap. And finally just disassembling the drive and giving it a good clean can improve performance quite a bit as well. I'm in the process of reviving a stack of these floppies myself, and those are the general areas I've learned to look out for.
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