jltursan
Veteran Member
I'm trying to fix a faulty Osborne 1 drive (a Siemens FDD-100-5) and that's what I've found until now:
Write troubleshooting:
- The faulty drive cannot write at all, when formatting with COPY tool, the Osborne hangs when writing track 0, drive is spinning but nothing more, it stays forever...
- If I try to format a protected floppy, it's detected correctly as protected (or at least seems so) and each track shows E and V. The working drive does the same.
- Just to be sure there's no problem with the WP sensor, the voltages measured are the same in both drives, low (0,1v) when open, high when closed (4,8V).
- As I have another working drive, swapping PCBs shows that the PCB seems to work fine.
Reading procedure:
- The faulty drive reads mostly flawlessly, at least all the Osborne originals.
- When pushed far seems to have some little misalignement compared with the working drive. It usually fails in reading PC written disks (with an HD drive), if the disks is in very good shape it could work sometimes. The working drive always read the disks created with the PC.
If PCB seems to be fine, could it be simply a head problem?, is this a common failure of Siemens drives?
Write troubleshooting:
- The faulty drive cannot write at all, when formatting with COPY tool, the Osborne hangs when writing track 0, drive is spinning but nothing more, it stays forever...
- If I try to format a protected floppy, it's detected correctly as protected (or at least seems so) and each track shows E and V. The working drive does the same.
- Just to be sure there's no problem with the WP sensor, the voltages measured are the same in both drives, low (0,1v) when open, high when closed (4,8V).
- As I have another working drive, swapping PCBs shows that the PCB seems to work fine.
Reading procedure:
- The faulty drive reads mostly flawlessly, at least all the Osborne originals.
- When pushed far seems to have some little misalignement compared with the working drive. It usually fails in reading PC written disks (with an HD drive), if the disks is in very good shape it could work sometimes. The working drive always read the disks created with the PC.
If PCB seems to be fine, could it be simply a head problem?, is this a common failure of Siemens drives?