mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson) (01/28/91)
Today I finally managed to fix my disk drive after about a dozen unsuccessful attempts. The problem started about a month ago, during a spell of cold weather. My Mac is in an unheated room, and apparently it was cold enough that the drive wouldn't work properly. Something hard was preventing disks from being inserted more than halfway in. I forced a disk in, which was the wrong thing to do, because that broke the disk drive in some fashion. I talked to someone at CJS systems, who gave me some tips on opening up the disk drive: 1) to unhitch the two side-springs, only unhitch the lower end; slip your thumbnail under the hook end of the spring and lift it off the post 2) remove the black plastic clip which loads and unloads the heads; if you don't do this, you'll bend the top head too much when you take the top plate off the drive, ruining the copper flexure spring. After much trial-and-error including much disassembly and reassembly of the drive and lubrication of sliding surfaces, I finally seem to have fixed it. There's a post on a lever on the top plate which ejects the disc--I had bent this lever. I had also splayed the sides of the sliding lower plate. By bending both back to something approximating their original shape, I seem to have fixed it.