Drive 2 not working

[hueyjones70]

I am using a 130XE with two XF551 drives and I was formatting some old diskettes that had nothing worthwhile on them. After I had formatted 5 or 6 disks, I got an error 173 so I figured bad disk, then it happened on the next 3 I tried, I went back to one of the earlier disks and drive 2 gave me an error 144 when I tried to get a disk directory. I switched out SIO cables and then hooked up a 1050 as drive 2. Same results, drive 2 will not work correctly. I tried formatting one of the bad disks in drive 1 and everything worked perfectly. What could be the source of the problem, I have read some blogs about SIO problems with the 130XE due to resistors located near the SIO out port. HELP!

[Xebec]

My first instinct would be dirty drive head.. clean with rubbing alcohol carefully..

 

Error 144 is pretty generic, covers all sorts of things:

Drive door open, no floppy present, write protected, sector not found, sector unwritable, sector bad CRC, sector unreadable, wrong track ID, and probably a few others.

[hueyjones70]

I changed disk drives and the problem remained.

[+DrVenkman]

Your post didn’t mention it, but when you swapped out cables and moved drives around, did you reboot and let the Atari reset the SIO bus? When you had troubles, did you change power supplies on the drives just to rule that out? And have you tried another DOS, again to help isolate the possible causes?

[hueyjones70]

As it turns out the disk drive has just gone BAD, the one I substituted was either already bad or went bad about the 2nd time it tried to read a disk. I took them apart, cleaned the drive heads and watched them try to read a disk then tried both drives on an 800XL and a regular 800 and they were NOGO. Now I guess I will try to sell them for parts because I don't know enough about electronics to repair them and I don't know of anyone that does repairs anymore.

[Kyle22]

There are people here that do repairs.

 

Let us know what area you live in, and I'm sure someone will offer help.

 

Unfortunately, I have no XF parts, but I could burn an EPROM if you need.

[russg]

As it turns out the disk drive has just gone BAD, the one I substituted was either already bad or went bad about the 2nd time it tried to read a disk. I took them apart, cleaned the drive heads and watched them try to read a disk then tried both drives on an 800XL and a regular 800 and they were NOGO. Now I guess I will try to sell them for parts because I don't know enough about electronics to repair them and I don't know of anyone that does repairs anymore.

This is obvious. You didn't mention the drive select switches.