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Another Disasterous meeting with Mr Wabash

Jorg said:
I just tried the drive rail lubrication procedure for the first time on a drive that had issues, and I have to say it succeeded very well (now that I finally found out how to access those drive rails.. )
Not only seems it reading normally again, it is also much quieter.
Removed as much dust as I could, then applied some oil that came with a hair clipper (if thats the right word).

I'm back on getting my ZIP 250 to work with my 5150 (it works on my 5160, but still not on the 5150....) but thats an whole other story.
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Good to hear that chunky peanut butter trick worked. :)

Andrew Lynch
 
I posted this on VOGONS earlier this month:

For this summer I had planned to make a final, complete backup of all my floppy disks collected over the years.

I started off with the 5 1/4" DD disks, which range from 16 to 22 years old, so initially I was quite pessimistic about their "survival". However, out of the 100 disks, only 5 had serious errors (excluding copy protection stuff), so I was very pleased with the result.

With the previous result in my mind, I enthustiastically began backupping the 3,5" DD/HD disks, 8-18 years old. However, my enthusiasm was soon tempered; 1 out of 3 disks had bad sectors (something I had expected earlier) and a pretty strange phenomenon emerged: Certain disks (mostly TDK branded) triggered a horrible grinding noise, as if the drive was in need of oil. It seemed like the drive motor couldn't keep up or something, so as soon as I heared the noise (it often began upon insertion of the disk), I broke off the backup process. After a while, I discovered that the contents of the "grinding" disks could be listed if tried multiple times. Unfortunately, this led me to reckless behaviour, like forcing the backup tool to retry and retry and retry. So obviously at one point, the floppy drive stopped responding, seemingly for good.

My question is: What is wrong with those disks? Is there any way to fix them? They have no remarkable visual differences and are not the oldest among the disks. Also they behave the same in every other floppy drive I tried and did not during an earlier (partial) backup in 1996 (I haven't used the disks since).
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This seems to be the same phenomenon adressed in this thread, apart from the disks being 3,5" in my case. So if I understand it correctly, the sound is caused by particles from the magnetic disk, which end up in the floppy drive mechanism? So the "grinding" disks themselves are beyond any repair?
 
Jorg said:
I'm back on getting my ZIP 250 to work with my 5150 (it works on my 5160, but still not on the 5150....) but thats an whole other story.
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I can't get either my ZIP100 or ZIP250 to work on my 5160 -- what operating system and GUEST version are you running? When I run GUEST (either 5.2 or 5.4) it just hangs.
 
Trixter said:
I can't get either my ZIP100 or ZIP250 to work on my 5160 -- what operating system and GUEST version are you running? When I run GUEST (either 5.2 or 5.4) it just hangs.
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Iomega's GUEST driver needs at least a NEC V20 or V30 processor to work. If you try it on a plain 8088 or 8086, it will hang. If you need 8088/8086 compatibility, try the shareware "PalmZip" driver.

I had a parallel ZIP100 drive working on my original IBM PC, using a swapped in NEC V20 chip, and an aftermarket parallel port card. I'm not sure if the original IBM parallel card (or the parallel port on the MDA card) would work; some don't support any kind of bidirectional communication, and thus won't let the ZIP driver work, not even in "nibble" mode. Unfortunately the built-in parallel port in my Tandy 1000RL is like that.
 
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