Weird problems with my 5.25" (360K) drive

[Denniske1976]

Hi everyone,

Got a new one for y'all this time ;-)

I was cleaning up (well, actually more like "relocating" because I can't get myself to throw things away) my old stuff. And of course, I stumbled upon a lot of old 5.25" diskettes (I even found one that says "IBM confidential" and has some kind of comm program on it).

Anyhoo, I fired up the old HeadStart LX-40 because that one has both a 3.5" 1.44M drive and also one 5.25" 360K drive... so I was gonna check all the disks, see what's readable and what's not and have a go at them with PC Tools diskfix or format what I didn't need anymore.

Now for the weird thing: somehow I can get a directory listing of all the diskettes, except for some where I get "sector not found". OK, could be that some disks are faulty since most of them weren't used since 1992 I think. For the ones that I can get a DIR, when I want to copy all of the files off to a directory on the harddrive (and that one still works without problems BTW), I can copy some files or maybe none at all before getting another "sector not found".

Now for the really weird part: So I tried formatting some disks that had old data on it that I didn't need anymore or have elsewhere, and it WILL format the disks upto 100% and after that I get some kind of "unable to write sector 0" and the format won't work... although I did hear the format going (that "ticking" noise). So, took one of the disks that I am able to DIR successfully and started diskfix. When I try to check the disk, everything seems OK but when I try a "revitalize disk" (actually that's reading a track, checking it, formatting it and writing back the track) it's really weird, but one track is OK, the next is bad, the next is OK, the next is bad.

So, could it be that maybe one of the drive heads is dirty or defect? The drive hasn't been used that much, because we always used 3.5" floppies as those were 1.44M. We only used those 5.25" disks when we got software from someone who had only 5.25" and then transferred it to either the harddisk or 3.5" disk.

I could try cleaning the heads with some alcohol right? Or is there a better way to clean them (I've read that those cleaning diskettes aren't the best way to go??)... the drive has never been cleaned in all those years, but then again neither has that 3.5" drive (and that's used a lot more).

Dennis

 

[DOS lives on!!]

Use a cleaning diskette with 91% or more alcohol.

I kind of have the same problem too. I can run programs from the disks, but when I try to copy the contents to the hard drive, it displays the Sector Not Found error.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Head cleaning is always a good idea.

It's likely that your drive isn't seeking correctly because the carriage rails are dirty or gunked up, so the heads never quite make it to the correct cylinder when doing a "long" seek. FORMAT writes and verifies consecutive tracks, this doesn't happen during the process. However, when it's hit the last cylinder, it does a long seek back to write the boot sector/FAT/blank directory and that's where things fall apart. Since the cylinder number is part of the sector ID field, you get a miscompare and a "sector not found".

Try cleaning the carriage rails with a bit of alcohol or even naphtha (paint thinner). Often, that will fix the problem.