ScuzzBlog: Diaries March 2020 Entry 4th March 2020: Post 02: A-500 - My failing floppy Pt II A-500 - My failing floppy Pt II OK more of my efforts to get the A-500 floppy drive working and in this next session I remove the drive and give the thing a good clean and take a closer look at those suspect capacitors. Previously: It is common place to have a clunky noisy floppy drive on an A-500. You have to remember that these drives are like thirty years old. So I can forgive a drive for being a little noisy, but what I can't tolerate is not reading disks. I had pulled this Amiga 500 to add to my feature on the numbers of A-500s I own and discovered that whilst it loaded the disk from the getgo it didn't load the disk again when I withdrew it. So I tried another disk and got the same result. The problem seemed to get worse the more I used the drive until it was refusing to boot also from a cold start. Nothing for it but to have a look inside the computer and see what was going on. Man was that a bad idea. I had four long sessions with this Amiga 500 in what was a marathon effort to get this A-500 computer working with the floppy drive. Here is what happened. A-500 - My failing floppy Pt II Time to remove that drive and take a look. First off I noticed the red edge on the ribbon did not coincide with Pin 1. Not a problem unless there is a blanking out spot on the connector. There are three screws on the base of the machine all with fine thread. Not self tappers. Remove the side screw. This unit has a base lifter cus I sense this is a newer A1200 style drive that is thinner than the usual A500 floppies. Note the extension pieces on the feet plus bracket that raise this thinner floppy drive. There is one tiny screw plus two larger plus the feet and bracket to remove before the inside slides out. Note that the motor is mounted on the side. The PCB simply folds back on itself. Revealing a very dusty dirty board. So much dust, dirt and hairs. Yuk ! OK I gave this floppy a deep clean. I am convinced that the hardened goo is hot glue. And why ? In the years of use if the capacitors had leaked it would have picked up dust and dirt. Below the surface of each gob of goo there is a totally clean board and the tracks have no black degrading. I believe the white pads indicate a surface where hot clear glue was used to hold down the capacitors which otherwise may have been dislodged with disks as they were inserted. Note the empty pad. All the components have the hot glue around them and not just the capacitors. I did attempt to clean out the switches with fluid but very difficult. I cleaned out the other switch also. If you look at the tracks below the goo you will see they are in perfect condition. So did it work ? Did it **ck !! If anything she was worse... Hmmm I think it is likely to be a dry capacitor. Maybe the one on the motor board. The drive is just not reading. OK time for another rethink. READ NEXT BLOG

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Last updated 4th March 2020

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