Commodore 1541 issues

[pollyisagoodbird]

I've been in possession of a C64 with a 1541 drive for a while now, with very little complaints. However recent games I have purchased for it are making me question if I have bad disks or a stubborn drive. When I began using the drive for the first time - probably the first time the drive has been used in years - it would take 3-4 tries per disk in order to get it working. I even had a mint in the box copy of Space Harrier that I had to try loading a handful of times before it would work. But this would happen with a small handful of disks until they started loading on the first try, and they have been ever since. Most of the disks I've acquired loaded perfectly the first time I took a look at them.

 

However, I'm somewhat concerned about certain disks I have, and I'm not sure if the drive is being stubborn, or if the disks are going bad. Here's what I've documented so far:

Ghostbusters - Game works perfectly fine, but on the "Activision" load screen, the drive makes loud grinding / clicking noises, the kind it makes if you try to load a disk and you get a disk read error on the DOS screen. It makes this noise twice, then it goes silent for a while, then it makes it one last time a few moment before the title screen appears. I assumed it was normal, but now not so much. The game loads and plays perfectly fine, so I wasn't sure if it was part of the loading process or not. It's not a pleasant sound, regardless.

 

Back to the Future Part 2 - I am able to get the title screen to load, with the intro animation and music, but when I hit the fire button, the screen goes into that color-changing loading state before it goes white. I can hear the disk spinning, but the head stops moving. It spins for a good few minutes before stopping altogether, leaving me locked on the white screen. A couple of times the screen went from white to black, but other than the color change, zero difference was made in how the drive behaved. Today I decided to try it again, and while it got stuck on the white screen, the drive kept on spinning. Another try brought me back to the DOS screen, which remained completely blank.

 

Castle Wolfenstein: game appears to run fine, but I think I get a clue as to what's up with the disk drive. When I start a new game, on the second text intro screen, the drive makes that clicking noise, but only for a moment. The drive stops completely and at the bottom I get:

Disk Error #20
read error, 30,16

Press any key to RETRY

Luckily I got my hands on the 1541 manual...it says #20 means "Block header not found", so I assume memory blocks 30 and 16 are unreadable for one reason or another

 

After pressing a key, then the game loads / plays normally. I played through the first few screens and tried to save the game, which did not work. The drive does the same thing as it did when loading a new game, making that momentary clicking noise, and then stopping. I get the following:

Disk Error #

...which I find odd, since this gives me no reference number.

Loading a previous save is like a dark joke, it appears to load normally, but what I get is a blank room. No doors, keys, or anything. Just you all by yourself, with ten bullets and a grenade. Kinda creepy.

 

 

So yeah, I'm not sure what's going on, but I want to at least have an idea before I decide to dismantle the whole thing.

 

 

[bluejay]

Clean the drive heads before you do anything with a q tip and some alcohol.

[pollyisagoodbird]

37 minutes ago, bluejay said:

Clean the drive heads before you do anything with a q tip and some alcohol.

I hope it's as simple as that, I'll update once I get to it.

[INTVCruise]

9 hours ago, pollyisagoodbird said:

I've been in possession of a C64 with a 1541 drive for a while now, with very little complaints. However recent games I have purchased for it are making me question if I have bad disks or a stubborn drive. When I began using the drive for the first time - probably the first time the drive has been used in years - it would take 3-4 tries per disk in order to get it working. I even had a mint in the box copy of Space Harrier that I had to try loading a handful of times before it would work. But this would happen with a small handful of disks until they started loading on the first try, and they have been ever since. Most of the disks I've acquired loaded perfectly the first time I took a look at them.

 

However, I'm somewhat concerned about certain disks I have, and I'm not sure if the drive is being stubborn, or if the disks are going bad. Here's what I've documented so far:

Ghostbusters - Game works perfectly fine, but on the "Activision" load screen, the drive makes loud grinding / clicking noises, the kind it makes if you try to load a disk and you get a disk read error on the DOS screen. It makes this noise twice, then it goes silent for a while, then it makes it one last time a few moment before the title screen appears. I assumed it was normal, but now not so much. The game loads and plays perfectly fine, so I wasn't sure if it was part of the loading process or not. It's not a pleasant sound, regardless.

 

Back to the Future Part 2 - I am able to get the title screen to load, with the intro animation and music, but when I hit the fire button, the screen goes into that color-changing loading state before it goes white. I can hear the disk spinning, but the head stops moving. It spins for a good few minutes before stopping altogether, leaving me locked on the white screen. A couple of times the screen went from white to black, but other than the color change, zero difference was made in how the drive behaved. Today I decided to try it again, and while it got stuck on the white screen, the drive kept on spinning. Another try brought me back to the DOS screen, which remained completely blank.

 

Castle Wolfenstein: game appears to run fine, but I think I get a clue as to what's up with the disk drive. When I start a new game, on the second text intro screen, the drive makes that clicking noise, but only for a moment. The drive stops completely and at the bottom I get:

Disk Error #20
read error, 30,16

Press any key to RETRY

Luckily I got my hands on the 1541 manual...it says #20 means "Block header not found", so I assume memory blocks 30 and 16 are unreadable for one reason or another

 

After pressing a key, then the game loads / plays normally. I played through the first few screens and tried to save the game, which did not work. The drive does the same thing as it did when loading a new game, making that momentary clicking noise, and then stopping. I get the following:

Disk Error #

...which I find odd, since this gives me no reference number.

Loading a previous save is like a dark joke, it appears to load normally, but what I get is a blank room. No doors, keys, or anything. Just you all by yourself, with ten bullets and a grenade. Kinda creepy.

 

 

So yeah, I'm not sure what's going on, but I want to at least have an idea before I decide to dismantle the whole thing.

 

 

I'm pretty sure thats exactly how Ghostbusters loads. I have a copy that starts to load then makes that clickly head banging noise like when you have a bad disk, then a few minutes of reading and it happens a second time but the game comes up and plays just fine no errors. I think your drive is probably fine atleast on ghostbusters. 

[pollyisagoodbird]

8 hours ago, INTVCruise said:

I'm pretty sure thats exactly how Ghostbusters loads. I have a copy that starts to load then makes that clickly head banging noise like when you have a bad disk, then a few minutes of reading and it happens a second time but the game comes up and plays just fine no errors. I think your drive is probably fine atleast on ghostbusters. 

That's reassuring; every time I hear that noise I wonder if the drive is going bad. It probably shouldn't be doing that with Wolfenstein, which is why I keep getting errors. I'll be dismantling by 1541 today, but there's a surprising lack of tutorials on youtube for the specific model I have. Mine had that knob you turn downwards to keep the disk in place. It seems like everyone else has the other model with the spring-loaded door. 

[pollyisagoodbird]

So I cracked the drive open and...well, it's pretty filthy on the back end. But the read/write head, however, is perfectly fine. I cleaned it off anyway, but I still have the same issues with Wolfenstein and Back to the Future 2. I'm wondering if there's anything else I can do to see if it's a bad disk issue besides sending the disks out to someone with a drive. I should note that I did not clean off the board, I'm going to have someone else do that and test the traces and whatnot, so I won't be using the drive again until I get that taken care of.

 

I also forgot to mention that when I purchased this Commodore and everything else, it did NOT have a head protector card in it, and went along with me for an hour drive. At the time I had no idea that they needed it, so I'm wondering if maybe the head got knocked around too much.

 

[tjlazer]

Yes a lot of copy protected disks would make that head banging sound.  That is copy protection.   Keep the drive away from any monitors too, they can get lots of read errors from the CRT.

[pollyisagoodbird]

10 minutes ago, tjlazer said:

Yes a lot of copy protected disks would make that head banging sound.  That is copy protection.   Keep the drive away from any monitors too, they can get lots of read errors from the CRT.

Interesting! I didn't know that. I did read somewhere about CRTs and how they mess with disks, so I do make an effort to keep a good distance between the monitor and drive - about the width and a half of the Commodore itself.

[motrucker]

9 hours ago, tjlazer said:

 Keep the drive away from any monitors too, they can get lots of read errors from the CRT.

You might even have to move your 1541 to the other side of your monitor to stop errors. This used to be common knowledge, I don't know what happened.

Are these game disks original, or copies? Some times even "good" copies can create problems loading.

5 ¼ disks can last quite well, but don't store then in a hot, humid environment. It will kill them. I have a few Elephant brand disks that date from the 1980s, and are still going strong.

 

[pollyisagoodbird]

On 1/29/2021 at 8:58 PM, motrucker said:

You might even have to move your 1541 to the other side of your monitor to stop errors. This used to be common knowledge, I don't know what happened.

Are these game disks original, or copies? Some times even "good" copies can create problems loading.

5 ¼ disks can last quite well, but don't store then in a hot, humid environment. It will kill them. I have a few Elephant brand disks that date from the 1980s, and are still going strong.

 

By 'the other side', do you mean behind? My current setup has everything side-by-side, the monitor on the left, then the Commodore, then the disk drive, with several inches between each. I don't think spacing or position is an issue, since all the other disks I have work fine. I wonder if it could just be bad disks, but I'm not sure how to test that out.

[motrucker]

By the other side, I mean if it's on the right side, try it on the left side of the monitor - obviously with several inches in between. However, if you're only having trouble with a couple of disks, it's most likely the disks causing the trouble, and not the position of the drive.

The only original disk I have of the what's giving you grief is Castle Wolfenstein. It has a "noisy" copy protection scheme (bangs the head a bit), but loads OK on my 1571 (I don't have a working 1541 right now). My guess is that this disk may have some damage on it.

Do you have a friend with a 1541 that you could load your disks on? either their system, or their drive. That's most likely the easiest way to test for bad disks.

 

 

 

[rmzalbar]

That's exactly how Ghostbusters copy protection works: There's an intentional error on one of the tracks that the game checks for while loading. Disk copy programs wouldn't copy the error, so the copies would refuse to load. The disk drive responds to an error with a track zero seek - that's the noise you hear. It's harmless for nearly all drives (some really early model 1541 drive were known to get bumped out of alignment over time.)

 

This was common only in the earliest days of copy protection; disk copy tools could soon reproduce those errors properly while copying, and so the game publishers had to move on to more sophisticated methods that didn't cause read errors. I have a copy of Ghostbusters that runs correctly on both PAL and NTSC machines, and has that protection patched out. It's a combination of a specific original disk image with a Maverick parameter applied. Could provide .G64 of it but you'd need some way to remaster it to a disk, such as a Zoomfloppy setup.

 

Another early Activision title I have that does the head bump-o-rama: Zone Ranger.

Edited August 5, 2021 by rmzalbar