X68000 compact 3"5 floppy drive wanted.

[gypsie]

hi all,

My Drive n°1 is dead. I ve changed all the capacitor but the drive eject the disk everytime.
The head drive don't move. 


So i'm looking for a working 3"5 working drive. It's for me the worst day of my life! Please help me my friends.

Thank you very much

[kamiboy]

Did you replace the secret cap as well?

[gypsie]

Did you replace the secret cap as well?

Yes and the disk spins well.

But the head don't move when disk is inserted (and rejected immediately).

I know that is my fault because i've done a big mistake when remplacing the caps. 

I ve used a 16v10uf capacitor which size was too big. When i ve inserted the disk, the drive reject it immediately but the disk stay stuck in the drive!!! And 2 sec after, i ve noticed a smell of "something toasting" so i turn off the computer.

I ve tried to resume my story...

I'm very stupid and very furious about what i ve done.

I hope to find a drive now....

[kamiboy]

That burning smell is bad news. I got that myself on one of my drives and it never worked after that.

Best thing to do is get a CF setup going and forget about the drives.

[gypsie]

For me the drive is dead. 

I will try the CF later i think.

But for now, i need to find a floppy drive...

If someone has a drive for sale, please contact me.

thank

[caius]

Hi, this is an option for you, though very expensive:

http://page10.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/m113764866

[SuperDeadite]

Hi, this is an option for you, though very expensive:

http://page10.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/m113764866

If you're willing to pay that much, just buy a full sized machine, you should be able to get a nicely equipped 030...

[gypsie]

Hi, this is an option for you, though very expensive:

http://page10.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/m113764866

It's too expensive for me

Normally i ve found a floppy drive with the help of Bluebmw.

[kamiboy]

If you're willing to pay that much, just buy a full sized machine, you should be able to get a nicely equipped 030...

Not if you factor the difference in shipping price. If that was a bit cheaper I would consider getting it for my Compact IV. But ~$500 with proxy commission and shipping is too rich for my blood. ~200$ and I would jump on it.

[gypsie]

Up!

Always looking for a 3"5 floppy drive....

[BlueBMW]

Screw 3.5" floppy drives.  Theyre nothing but trouble.  Go compact flash and forget about writing floppy disks.

[kamiboy]

Yeah, I second that. There are no original games on 3.5" floppy so it is pointless to try and run games that way.

Even with a working drive the floppy medium is one of the most fragile storage solutions in history.

[NFG]

Floppies are fragile?  That's crazy talk.  We're all standing around using 20 year old computers and games, and they generally still work.  The drives go out of whack often enough, but most consumer electronics from that era will do that.  The media themselves?  Robust as fuck, my friend.  5.25" especially, with that low bit density - I've got early 80s Atari floppies that all still work just fine.  I've misplaced and folded floppies that recovered just fine.  They're less fragile than CDs and less prone to failure than HDDs.  Floppies are awesome. 

[BlueBMW]

Oh I think floppy disks are cooler than polar bear crap but specifically these darn compact 3.5" drives... they seem unusually prone to failure

[NFG]

Yeah, 3.5" drives and media are largely horrible.  Early ones especially, we had endless troubles with the first gen drives in Atari STs and PCs.  Wretched things.

[kendrick]

I'm dropping this idea free and clear for anybody to implement it if they can.

One of the purposes of spinning media was to overcome expensive or non-existent caching. The need to read all that data sequentially made it necessary to run a lot of motors and create a lot of wear on the mechanisms. As everybody's observed, in most cases the actual floppy disks are fine but the drives are all busted and flaky.

There are interesting developments in the world of analog music storage. In the case of vinyl records, the needle used to read the grooves in a disk not only wears itself out, but slowly destroys the record. While it's been fashionable to use a laser to prevent wear on the record, we're on the cusp of being able to image the whole record in high resolution and just store the thing in some memory to play it. And we can do this at a level that preserves audio fidelity because memory is cheap now, and we can cache up gigs and gigs at a time.

The EM equipment available at a consumer level is almost sensitive enough that we could image an entire floppy disk without even spinning it. Wouldn't that be wild? Instead of all the complicated springs and motors, you'd just slide your floppy on a tray under a big sensor that loads the whole floppy into a RAM disk. This theoretical EM drive could be attached to any old hardware that it could talk to and read original media without the wear and tear of moving parts.

I suppose you could emulate all the drive signalling and create a little hardware box that acted like a floppy drive that just read IMG files off of a USB stick or something. But I like my idea better because it's impractical in an artistic way.

[gypsie]

I'm waiting for the Help of BlueBMW about compact flash on my  x68000 compact.

[caius]

Hi, this is my tutorial about  X68000 Compact and Compact Flash modification.You could try yourself , it's not really difficult:

http://gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id=x68000:internal_scsi_and_cf_card_mod

[gypsie]

Hi, this is my tutorial about  X68000 Compact and Compact Flash modification.You could try yourself , it's not really difficult:

http://gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id=x68000:internal_scsi_and_cf_card_mod

Too difficult for me.

I want to use the external scsi connector instead.

[gypsie]

up!

[papa_november]

Try to look for Canon drives with similar part numbers - you might be able to exchange parts between the two.

[gypsie]

Try to look for Canon drives with similar part numbers - you might be able to exchange parts between the two.

More info about that?

[papa_november]

Not much more than that, I'm afraid. The drives used in every X68000 but the Pro and Compact are half-height 5.25 Canon MD-5501 series drives with the main PCB changed and a motorized eject mechanism added. Check back to some of the earlier threads in this forum, there might be better info and some photos.

Versions of these drives without the soft-eject mechanism turned up in a number of random portable PC systems from the mid-to-late 80s; I've pulled a few out of a couple of Compaq portables and external drive units. That said, even these are very difficult to find.

The Pro uses modified TEAC drives, which again, have a different PCB and a soft eject mechanism added. The PC equivalents of these drives are by far the easiest to find.

The Compacts use early-laptop-form-factor 3.5 drives. Again, they are modified Canon drives featuring a soft-eject mechanism that the PC version lacks, as well as the electronics to drive it. I don't know the model number off the top of my head, but the PC model number and the X68000 model number are likely to be similar. They're somewhat taller than modern laptop floppy drives, and are extremely rare. I don't know what early laptop models are likely to have them.

Canon also made a combination floppy drive that bolted the half-height 5.25 mechanism and the laptop 3.5 mechanism together and fit in a standard 5.25 drive bay. Combo floppy drives are relatively scarce and are in extremely high demand. The Canon combo drives are the rarest of the bunch and I've only seen one example in person.

NONE of these PC drives are anything approaching drop-in replacements. The stepper motor, heads, frame, and drive motors will be identical, but everything else will be completely different. At best, they'd be good sources of parts for people who already have the tooling and knowledge to calibrate disk drives.

[gypsie]

up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[BlueBMW]

Very interesting papa november...  My old dos machine has one of those combo 3.5/5.25 drives.  Im curious to take a closer look at it.

[caius]

CompactXVI use a modified version of Canon MD3641, the assembly is pratically the same except for the PCB and eject mechanism:




@Gypsie :
I may have at least one working CompactXVI FDD among my four ones.I'm passing to HxC SD floppy emulator so they will be useless to me ( sure I will miss the extra-functions for now ).I'm not 100% sure of correct working state since  I can test them (my ribbon cables are broken and I replaced the FFC connectors on motherboard with simple male pin headers in anticipation of HxC FDD emulator use) but last time I tried, a pair of them worked fine.I could post a pair to you so you can test them but keep in mind that I'm located in Italy.