SE with bad floppy drives?

#1 Mon, 18 Feb 2008 - 00:12

As some of you know I picked up an SE (superdrive) over the weekend. It's a somewhat rare model, sporting 2 floppy drives AND a SCSI HD. I believe the SCSI drive has an aftermarket mount, but I haven't opened the thing up yet.

Anyway. The only way i have to transfer files from my iMac 2.4ghz to it is via floppy. I have a few disks, and I formatted one (mac OS standard) on my iMac. I then put it into the SE and it said it was unreadable. I then initialized it on the SE - and that failed.

Do these drives go bad? Should I try cleaning them out a bit?

#2 Mon, 18 Feb 2008 - 01:00

If a drive can't even read a known-good floppy that it formatted, it sure sounds like a drive problem. The first thing to try, as you suspected, is to give the heads a good clean. These drives can also suffer a form of arthritis, in which the lubricant gradually turns into a glue-like substance. That can prevent the heads from loading properly onto the disk surface. If loading/ejection seems a bit balky, a good clean and re-lube is probably a good idea.

#3 Mon, 18 Feb 2008 - 14:23

I think I'm going to have to crack it open. The drives don't read consistently [

] ]'> oh well...

#4 Mon, 18 Feb 2008 - 17:17

OH - I just remembered I have a SCSI ZIP drive! I could use that to transfer files instead....

#5 Mon, 18 Feb 2008 - 22:37

Yes, the zip will indeed solve many of your problems. In fact, you can even make a bootable zip disk with a complement of disk tools -- very handy in case of HD crashes.

#6 Tue, 19 Feb 2008 - 05:58

As some of you know I picked up an SE (superdrive) over the weekend. It's a somewhat rare model, sporting 2 floppy drives AND a SCSI HD.

I look at your other post ... are you sure it has 2 Superdrives? Is the case marked FDHD? Or is it a stock SE with the Superdrive SWIM upgrade?

Typically they would not have sold an FDHD with two floppy drives and if upgraded to SWIMs, they may not have replaced both or either 800K floppy drive. Instead they may have added the after-market hard drive and bought an external Superdrive. In which case, your HD disk would not work from the iMac and might not format correctly on the 800K drive. Or it could just be bad drives ... but both of them? Suspect.

#7 Tue, 19 Feb 2008 - 07:13

Good catch, Mac128. I missed the fact that he had two floppy drives. I agree that it would be unusual to have dual FDHD drives, and also for both to go bad (although it's not unheard of). He should try formatting, then reading, 800K floppies in those drives and see if things start working.