Force eject floppy?

[samaron]

Hi!

I have a floppy disk that throw me an error during boot. The main problem however is the soft eject function. The computer won't let me eject it. Are there any way to force eject the floppy, or perhaps bypass floppy during boot to get into the system on the hard drive? Or is this a case of having to pull the whole thing apart and manually eject the floppy from the mechanism?
I'm not entirely sure what the error is, as it only appear for a split second and then try to read the disk again to throw the message again for a split second. No funny scraping sounds or anything from the drive either. Just the regular floppy drive sounds.

[leonk]

If a floppy is not bootable, the x68k will automatically eject it. Given it's not doing it tells me you
got a problem. Have you replaced the capacitors in the floppy drive?

[Jehuty]

Will it eject the Disk with the emergency eject button on the backside of the X68k ?

[kamiboy]

Only OG models have that button.

[samaron]

This is an XVI model. I have never seen anything indicating an emergency eject button on the back.

The floppy started to boot, at least enough to give a command prompt. I then accessed switch.x on the hard drive and set it to eject floppy disks when powered off. It didn't work either. I then proceeded to put a disk in drive 1 and it spits that one out. If I put my ear right next to drive 0, I can hear a faint sound of it trying to do something. My conclusion is that there is a mechanical fault at play here. I initially thought it was the software keeping me from ejecting it.

I will pull it apart when I have time and turn the gear manually to eject it. Someone told me that it does happen the lubricant gets gummed up and need re-greasing. Hopefully I have some white lithium grease around.

The soft eject is a cool idea, but a terrible one in hindsight I suppose.

[kamiboy]

Since the problem is mechanical then soft eject is not to blame. You can eject a disk as soon as you turn on the machine by holding down the eject button, or continually pressing it before the machine starts to read it.

I would try and help the disk by budging it while pressing eject. Ortherwise there is nothing else to do than open that baby up. Maybe the capacitors in the drive are on their way out? Better inspect those while you have the thing out.

[repoMan]

I'm with Kamiboy, it's capacitor's fault, no mechanical. Usually mechanical problems appear after a long period of no use, sudden problems can be due broken parts; but it's extremely rare.

The only trick I can suggest (it has worked for me fine enough) is to keep the machine on for several minutes and then, trying again, powering off and on repeatedly. If the eject never acts, then you'll need to disassemble the unit, clean it and replace capacitors