strub@sdics.ucsd.EDU (Hank Strub) (11/24/87)
I too have experienced misc. destroyed floppy directories on my within-warranty dual-floppy SE, although it seems to happen only for the upper drive. I had guessed that the problem was due to the drive being slightly misaligned with the slot, a problem I had remembered hearing about on Pluses. I was resolved to get my machine 100% right. After a week (and the bookstore PROMISED only 2-3 days), I've been told that both drives passed all diagnostics, and that there is no way to tell that a drive is slightly misaligned unless it fails the diagnostics. Has anyone actually found the source of this very intermittent problem? Is there a way to check floppy drive alignment with the drive's slot? Thanks in advance for any suggestions, Hank Strub UCSD, Institute for Cognitive Science strub@nprdc.arpa OR strub%sdics@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu OR . . .!sdcsvax!sdics!strub
cm450s02@uhccux.UUCP (11/25/87)
In article <415@sdics.ucsd.EDU> strub@sdics.ucsd.EDU (Hank Strub) writes: > >Has anyone actually found the source of this very intermittent >problem? Is there a way to check floppy drive alignment with >the drive's slot? > I assume you're talking about the physical alignment of the floppy drive opening with the drive itself. If so, the only problem I've even had with my Mac Plus in this respect was that floppies tended to get jammed a lot. They'd eject only halfway, so I'd have to either use the paper clip approach, or else push the disk back in and try ejecting it again. A closer look revealed that the floppy disk was actually scraping the edges of the slot as it was being ejected. As it turned out, the drive mounting bracket was warped from the time I dropped the Mac on the floor. The floppy drive's heads had been smacked together in the same accident, and the drive began eating large numbers of disks. The heads must have either been cracked or scratched, because a close look at some of the damaged disks revealed many very fine scratches in the disk surface, which were not there previously. Generally, these disks could not even be reformatted. I've since gone on to a Mac II, and most of these problems have gone away, though I consistantly seem to have problems with Dysan floppies. No matter who's machine I'm using, they seem to lose sectors from time to time. The only other problems occur with floppies containing frequently updated files, such as word processor documents. In these cases, it's mostly a case of the files becoming so fragmented as to be unreadable.