[Coco] drive hastles

[Steve Ostrom]

Chet, I mentioned this a few weeks ago.  Please don't assume that your 
5.25" drives are bad until you have tried to clean them.  I have 
transferred literally thousands of Coco diskettes to my Cloud-9 hard 
drive system.  Every once in awhile, I'll run into a bad diskette where 
the magnetic media has started to scale off the plastic.  It sounds 
almost like you are running a piece of sandpaper in the drive.  Whenever 
this happens, my drive dies.  I get I/O errors, and even looking at 
previously good diskettes give the same errors.  Can't format, may be 
able to read parts of the directory, maybe none.  Running a cleaning 
diskette in the drive has always cured the problem.  I just saw one on 
eBay tonight for about $5 plus $5 shipping.  I have about three of these 
because they are not made any more.  You usually get a bottle of 
solution - maybe alcohol based?  Plus you get  a 5.25" diskette that has 
a window punched in it to apply the cleaning solution.  The disk inside 
the diskette cover has a fairly rough white surface that absorbs the 
cleaning solution.  Just add solution, place diskette in drive, and type 
almost any disk command, such as DIR in RSDOS.  The drive will spin a 
few seconds, and the drive heads will be cleaned.  (Of course, if you've 
already tried this, your drives went belly up !! )

-- Steve --



Chester A. Patterson wrote:

>Hi,
>
>My three 5.25" floppies went belly up (I/O error) Another 5 that I bought at
>junk stores don't work. Didn't really expect them to work, desperation I
>guess. One original 3.5" 720k and several 1.44M appear fine. ALL my OS9 boot
>disks are 5.25" 35 and 40 track. Fortunately I have most of my system files
>on 3.5". I hope they read OK!
>
>How do I poke Extended ADOS3 to work with 80 tracks? Then I must somehow
>make a 3.5" OS9 boot disk, boot up, make my ST-225 bootable again, and
>continue with life working exclusively with 3.5" floppies. I'm trying to get
>my rig up and running smoothly after over 12 years and problems just keep
>getting in the way!
>
>Thanks for help and suggestions!
>
>/Chet
>Costa Rica
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