Trouble shooting my STf internal 720k drive

[Gunstar]

Yesterday, suddenly, my STf internal 514(?) drive stopped reading disks and I'd get the "disk drive not responding" error window. I opened it up to discover that the top read/write head had come loose. I fixed this by glueing it back in place, unfortunately in order to get at it, I had to remove the screws that held the arm in proper alignment. I have since been trying to find the "sweet spot" to get it to read disk properly again. 360k disks work fine since only the bottom head is used. I have gotten to the point were I no longer get the "drive not responding" error, and one disk (a menu disk with the auto file) actually loads the menu, but no progarams after that. The rest of the disks give me the "bombs" which is better than the "disk drive not responding" error, but I have yet to get the exact "sweet spot" where it will load everything properly.

 

This brings me to my question: Are there any diagnostic programs or something that I can use to help me re-align my top head/arm properly? Doing it by guestimate just hasn't quite worked out. I know I'm so close that I could almost blow on it to get it aligned properly...

Has anyone done this type of trouble-shooting before that could help me out or give me pointers? Some type of diagnostic disk alignment program (preferably on 360k disk so I can load it) would be of great help, but I don't know if such a thing ever even existed.

[Gunstar]

Well, I decided to give just one more good ol' college try...and it worked! At least MOST of my 720k disks load up now, a couple crashed the first couple times, but then loaded, a couple just keep crashing, but the majority seem to load fine now. That's good enough for me for now, I'll eventually replace the thing and get another drive&harddisk, but for now I'm happy to at least have the majority of my disks working. I suppose that the ones that don't work may just be going bad anyway, as I'm using very old disks that came with the machine when I got it...need to get some new 720k floppies...happy once more

[LinkoVitch]

Fastcopy 3 is your friend.. amazing what dead disks you can semi bring back with that

 

Also when you do get a new drive make sure you get a DD drive and not a PC HD. To use a HD Drive you needed to modify some of the circuitry .. not 100% sure if this was just to use it as a HD drive or if it was to just alow you to use it as a DD or not.

[Gunstar]

I was told by someone here, not too long ago, the thread is probably still on the first page, that the PC HD discs will work, but only as 720k. But you have to reverse the ribbon cable 180 degrees and I think cross something too, but it will work as is if you do this...he was doing it because the PC drives are faster, I don't care myself, hell, I still use 1050 drives on my 8-bit, so ST drives are faster than those...I'd just as soon replace it with the original Atari drives as I don't want to cut up my ST case to get the PC drives to work anyway. I do have an extra dual PC drive with 5.25 and 3.5 drives that I'm going to attempt connecting as a second&third drives, but I need to study up on it a bit more as I'd like to connect them to the internal ribbon cable the same way as that guy said he was going to use the PC drive as a replacement, but I don't know if the ST can read multiple drives off of the same ribbon cable like PC's can (just by changing jumpers to read as b&c (or whatever) drives. Do you or anyone know if this is possible? Or will I have to rig an interface with the external floppy connection?

[LinkoVitch]

i'd guess the external connector and the ribbon cable are connected together inside. I am not sure if both floppy select lines are present in the external socket tho (or if thats how it works)