Testing 12 mystery PC floppy drives

well hello everyone and welcome back to Adrian's digital basement 2. on today's video we have some scintillating content we got some disk drives and I'm gonna be testing them in this video super exciting I know but uh well it looks like we have at least 10 five and a quarter inch disk drives and then a couple three and a half inch these are all drives I've sort of been accumulating over time here in the basement and I like to test these just to make sure they work and I like to mark them to say if they are 360k or 1.2 and then if they have the capability if they're 1.2 Megs are running at dual speed I'll talk a little bit more about what that means in a second but yeah let's uh let me put this on the ground it's quite heavy and let's get started for testing purposes I have my test bench here the test bench it's my 3d6 SX system we'll just slide this into view actually so we have it hooked up through a CGA card to the RGB to HDMI we have the XD IDE right here with a compact flash card that's for booting up into dos I do have my postcard in there it's not really needed for this and then we have floppy Drive slash IDE slash serial multi i o thing controller there and I have a long scuzzy cable or scuzzy cable I have a long floppy cable and it's got all the connectors on here for hooking up to those different floppy drives of course you need to have both the small one here that's for a three and a half inch disk drives and this larger one and that of course is out of focus but there it is that is for the five and a quarter inch drives this cable is quite long which I like and this one here without the twist this is for the B drive so we won't be using that and this cable has another set of B Drive connectors on it not to mention it has some tape on here because at one point I had a connector here which I relocated I probably stuck it on there and then moved it at some point a rather essential tool for testing these types of disk drives are cleaning floppies and I have a few different ones here so two of them here for a three and a half inch drives and then this one is designed for single-sided drives it's not really designed for it but I stuck this little piece of plastic over it so we won't be using that one I think this Radio Shack disc yes it's good to go for the double-sided drives all of these are double-sided so that's what we'll be using and then I have a little bottle here which has 99 percent IPA in there this is the first disk drive let's see what type of drive it is here there it is tiac fd55 GFR I'm going to say that this is probably a 1.2 megabyte drive and I quickly looked this up and sure enough the G in the GFR model number there represents 1.2 megabytes now some of these drives some of these Tea Act drives have a really cool feature that can be helpful with certain machines if we flip this over and we take a look at the PCB here there are spaces for all sorts of jumpers on here now I'm going to have to go look this up to see if this is one of the capable drives but there is often a jumper on these drives that allows it to operate in dual speed mode so a 1.2 megabyte Drive I've talked about this before it's an 80 track Drive 96 track per inch and the spindle while it's reading 1.2 megabyte drives or discs that is it runs at 360 RPM and that is to simulate or emulate the way eight inch disk drives are because when IBM came up with a 1.2 Meg standard they just took the eight inch disk drive and they shrunk it down to a five and a quarter inch form factor well and that's what we have here an eight inch drives they run at 360 RPM unlike the 300 RPM that 360k or double density disks run at and also almost all three and a half inch drives also run at 300 RPM so the way these drives are normally configured at least for operation with IBM PCS is that the spindle always runs at 360 RPM and when you're reading a double density disk in one of these disk drives it should be running at 300 RPM but what IBM did is they I guess they like altered the floppy Drive controller maybe they came up with a special version or I don't know if they all support this or not but with the floppy Drive controller on the computer does is to facilitate reading a double density disk which should be read at 250 kilobits per second on a 300 RPM drive when it is spinning at 360 RPM the controller can read that disk at 300 kilobits per second versus the 250 kilobits per second that it should be at the Dual speed operation that some of these teac drive support is quite useful because if you're using this drive on a machine that only has a double density controller so 250 kilobit that controller generally cannot read or support any drive that is running at 300 RP it needs to be running at 250 RPM but there are certain old computers that use 80 track drives which is what this is remember I said it's 80 track at 96 tracks per inch a normal 360k disk drive is 40 tracks at 48 tracks per inch so if you want to be able to use one of these types of drives with one of those computers that happens to use a 96 track per inch 80 track drive but only a double density resolutions or resolutions bitrate you need to run the drive in dual speed mode or at least run it at 300 RPM now the way that works is if it's supported on the drive there's a jumper on here somewhere one of these jumpers you can set and puts it into dual speed mode and then there's an extra signal that comes from the controller and the PC does send this and when it sends the high density signal the spindle runs faster at 360 RPM to read 1.2 Meg disks and when it's sending the double density signal or no signal then the spindle will run at 300 RPM for that 250 kilobits per second so I like to identify if the drive has that dual speed mode and either put a jumper on there and then I will write usually on the side of the drive here that this is a 1.2 Meg drive and if it's dual speed I will write that as well so it helps me identify quickly if the drive is one that I could use in one of those machines now I happen to have a couple computers floating around here in the basement stuff that I haven't shown on the channel yet that does use these 80 track or 96 track per inch disk drives at 250 kilobits per second so the Dual speed nature of these is what I'm looking for and that's what we're going to try to identify in this big pile one more thing I'm going to talk about here is that often there are many variants of these drives just like slight differences and not always is there a jumper available to do the Dual speed or it has a later controller or whatever that doesn't even support it or it's a different brand looks like they're not all TX drives in this box here so there are many types of drives that are 1.2 megabytes that do not run at dual speed there's the diatribe about why the Dual speed is important but of course we need to make sure that the disk drive actually works and yeah so in fact there's 12 drives in this box put your comment down below of how many you think are gonna actually work these are totally untested I don't even know where these came from these are all given to me over time I've just sort of accumulated them in this box and like I said we're going to start doing some testing so I did a quick Google for the part number on this drive with datasheet and came up with this one here from duramp and there it is dual speed if it's running in high density mode you are good for 360 RPM and if you're running in double density or normal density mode then you're good for 300 in single speed mode like I told you is how this drive is almost certainly configured right now then it will run at 360 RPM in both high and normal which results I think we scroll over here there it is 300 kilobits per second and 500 versus 500 and 250. all right here we are zoomed up on the controller so right off the bat drives like zero through three are available so Drive select one is what you need to have it on for the PC but if you're going to use this drive on like a another computer that has a normal sugar style interface you would have to set it on drives like zero typically or drives like one two or three depending on you know which drive you wanted to act as now when we look at the jumper configuration here it's uh it's not looking exactly the same and this is pretty typical so there's d033 and U1 and U2 it looks like we have a u zero right there and a U1 okay so that's the same it's a little blurry uh then we have these two jumpers here which aren't in the same position there plus it shows this stuff over here which again doesn't really match but what I'm going to need to do is look through here which of these needs to be changed for the Dual speed here it is speed mode I I and I S when the eye strap is on the on state dual speed mode is designated when the eye strap is on the on-state single speed mode is set and when is on the OS tape dual speed mode is selected like Item B however the FTD maintains the ready state with no relation to the signal okay I think it's the eye strap that I really want to change it to is there even the eye strap on here I got to put my goggles on and there is the eye strap so this right here I think is the eye strap there's the is strap what I don't see is the eye eye strap which is currently what it should be set to now without a doubt when we notice that there are lots of holes in here for jumpers that aren't installed and I'm assuming that you know you could clear these out install pins if you needed to and some of these might actually be shorted on the PCB so you would have to cut through a trace like right there to break that so you could install a jumper selectively but as I just said I don't see the eye ice trap so I'm going to try setting the eye jumper right here hopefully that overrides the eye or default setting which is just not currently available here remember looking back here on some of these drives you have this little T configuration with I III and is so there would be a jumper there on II and you just move it to the eye setting and then that should set the Dual speed mode do remember though that if you are trying to use this on a normal IBM PC you should set it for single speed mode The Way It Is by default and the reason why is the PC does expect it to be running at that 360 RPM or 300 kilobits per second while you're reading double density disk that's just the way dos is set up to work so that's the way you have to have these drives set but as I said earlier I like to identify if the drive well a works and then B runs in dual speed mode and then I can mark it as such and if ever go do use this on a PC it's just a normal 1.2 Meg drive then I will set it back to you know single speed mode I do recommend though by the way if you're ever reading double density discs or especially writing those discs on a PC you shouldn't even use one of these disk drives you should really use a 48 track per inch Drive the reason why that matters and again I talked about it in my disk drive video I'll link to that down in the description below the reason why that matters is because when you write onto a floppy disk using the 48 track per inch head the lines that get written down the tracks that get written down are wider and the 96 track per inch head that's on here has just a much finer pitch when it writes the circular tracks now generally on a blank disk if you created a 360k disc on a drive like this then it would read back without any kind of issue on a 40 track drive but if you have a disc that was written before on a 40 track drive or a 48 track per inch drive with a thicker wider heads when this tries to write to it and erase the heads it's not really going to be able to erase the entire width of the track so it's going to write down the new track in the middle of the old track is going to have like some of the old track in there and some of the new track and that could possibly cause issues down the road if a drive like this is the only drive that you have and you need to write a double density disk I recommend what you do is you degauss the disc first so it completely erases it and removes all the tracks from it first then you can write it without an issue read and write it in and drive like this but if you're trying to read and write a disk that was previously used on a regular 360k Drive I really don't recommend it you can read it but I don't recommend trying to write to it and there's one other thing to consider also by the way if you're making archived copies of a 360k disc they just work better in 360k drives running at the correct 300 RPM then in a drive like this so the disk images you create in a high density disk drive at that 300 kilobits per second are much more difficult to write and deal with when someone is trying to create a disk later on an actual 360k drive so anyways okay that's enough going on let's uh plug this into power and let's see spit Dusty this drive but let's see if this thing can work alrighty what I'm going to do is I'm going to boot up the system there hey it's seeked so that's something um I have it set for 1.44 megabytes there it doesn't matter I'm going to be using IMD for testing this drive and IMD controls the disk controller directly so it doesn't matter at all what the BIOS is set to in fact you could have the BIOS set to no disk drives and IMD is still going to be able to talk to the drive without an issue so we're here in IMD actually to set this up for this drive so it's a two-sided Drive double step is going to be off because this is an 80 track drive and does say 80 right there that stuff doesn't matter and we'll just put this as one to one and now what we can do is we can hit clean head and we can watch to see if this is actually going to move the heads properly sounds like it's working fine what I'm going to do is we're going to put some of this IPA on this cleaning disc here look it's spinning properly so that's a good sign and we'll just let this sort of go through a cleaning cycle here I'll do that one more time it allows you to do it up to nine times but you know it doesn't really matter I'm going to grab a high density disk and we'll see if it can read it all right here's a disc it's high density it does say two tests so I'm assuming I will have formatted this disk not a hundred percent sure okay so we go to a line and we hit enter and what this is going to do okay so it's reading the disk without any issue so that beep is it's reading 30 tracks so this has a 15 um tracks per or 15 sectors per track but it's the edge I don't know this program just shows a surety a 30. I don't remember why and if we hit like one that goes to track 10 20 30 now if it weren't reading the track properly or say watch if I slow down the spindle here see how it's just there we go so it's giving you know issues there um then you'll have lower numbers it should be a consistent 30 on every track and this of course is formatted this disk is formatted in another machine with a known working drive so here we are on track 70 you should be able to jump around the disc and read oops I went to track 80 there um track 79 is the highest so I'll hit minus and now we're on track 79 it's reading properly it's reading on head zero so the bottom side of the disk if I hit H now at the top you can see it says H1 that means it's reading from the top side of the disk so yeah it's working it's normal for it to make a weird beep while it seeks because as the head's moving it's going to miss a few sectors if the head were out of alignment watch I'm going to put this on three and then I'm going to move the head Watch What Happens so notice how the beeps change and it says 0 and 30. so what it's saying is that it's still reading 30 sectors off the disk but it's expecting it's on track what 34 and it's reading 30 sectors or 15 sectors from an adjacent track if I move the head back there we go now it's back on the correct track and if I move it here it's wrong again and what you can do is hit recal recalibrate it goes back to the zero track because there's a sensor and then yeah so we're good going back to the main menu here we hit test RPM and with this disk in here we should see 360 RPM and there it is it's about 359 it's settling in 500 kilobits per second so it's definitely in the high density mode right now I want to see if this thing is actually running in dual speed mode right now because I have it set that way let's grab a double density disc it does need to be one that's formatted on another machine I don't know if this disk is or not so let's do test RPM and what it tries to do tries to read the disc to see um you know what bit rate it's running at yeah I don't think this disk is formatted but just to make sure what I'm going to do is I'm going to format this on my PC over here on a known good 360k drive so I have you know known quantity to start with all right the disk is formatting in the other machine over there one thing I'm noticing is it doesn't appear that this drive is actually running in dual speed mode and the reason why I say that is because you can usually hear it sort of change speed when I hit a for analyze I'm going to pop the cleaning disc in when I hit a for analyze we should be able to hear the tone of that like scratchy sound of cleaniness change frequency as it changes from 250 to 500 and it's absolutely not changing at all it's staying at exactly the same speed you can absolutely hear it change speed as the bit right there changes from 250 to 500 to 300. so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull this jumper off here and we are going to install the is jumper here okay let's try that one analyze no that is not doing anything now thinking about this one of the potential issues is that the floppy Drive controller which I'm using here let me pop it out of the computer this controller I don't normally use this one and it may lack that density signal altogether so we're gonna switch to a controller that I know has the density signal which is this one right here this is a controller that I've used many many times on here and uh just as a side note this is the one that I accidentally damaged the ROM I killed the ROM on it and this allowed the jumpers here to use different floppy drives on an XT so you could use high density drives on them XT a viewer reached out to me here and found the ROM image it's not exactly the same raw Mage that I had on this card originally because this one used to display a message that said like 1.44 Meg disk if you had set for 1.4 but on the other hand this ROM does work it doesn't display a message but it works so yes thank you very much for sending that over I've had it for a while and I just finally got around to testing it so let's see what's going to happen so if I go into the BIOS by the way and I you know have this set for no floppy Drive like uh there we go not installed because that card has a ROM on there it is still going to actually try to initialize this disk drive see there it goes and it did the seek and everything all right while it boots up this disc is now formatted as a 360k so we are good to go uh this drive does work so that's a good sign uh let's go to IMD again okay here we go let's do analyze again nope that is not changing speed so I'm going to try setting this jumper error out of course because there's a cleaning disc here I just put it back on the eye setting there this may not be able to do the Dual speed let's try alignment one more time oh there we go it's working yeah Okay cool so that other controller doesn't support that signal now that doesn't matter because for the PC uh you don't need that signal so let's exit out of here by the way and let's pop in the formatted disk now like I said on the PC you don't need that signal anyways because if you said single speed mode then the drive will just run the same speed all the time so if we go to alignment here we should be able to read this disk yeah I hear it changing speed so there we go there we go 250 kilobits per second and it is currently reading 18 which is correct because it's nine sectors per track and um the difference is watch this if I hit plus we get nothing because remember this is a 40 track disc and this is an 80 track drive so it's in between the two tracks right now and if we hit plus again we are around what the drive thanks is track two right because we had a blank track in there but what's happening is it's reading what is track one because remember there's only 40 tracks on this disc this is excellent this means that this drive is working and if we test the RPM now now that it's in dual speed mode it will run at 300 RPM and that's with this disc in there here it goes there it is so the RPM takes a little while to stabilize with this program but this is a working dual speed drive and even though it's very dusty as is normal for these TX it's very reliable I've had a few of these TX die over the years but this one wow this is a working Drive awesome I'm just going to write on the side here so um 96 TPI right slash 80 Tracks Of course and then the other important thing is this is dual speed and um I'm just going to write somewhere on here JP is i that's the Dual speed jumper just to remind me and it gets a tick mark because it freaking works just needs a little bit of a clean but I won't do that in this video because uh just needs to be dusted off maybe a little drop of lubricant or whatever on the slider there although with the power turned off yeah this thing moves very very freely so cool good drive that's one down and there's like 12 more to go I will go quicker because I don't need to talk as much let's grab another Tea Act drive because we'll go to the other brands in a second okay so GFR so I think this is the same drive and it's in cleaner shape the jumper situation is exactly the same so I'm gonna get a little jumper I'm going to put it on the eye there and ass Jumper's too big I need to use a low profile one low-ish profile there it is the eye jumper and we're on drives like one which is remember correct for the PC and this thing as I said is in nice shape okay so heads move freely let's power on the computer here and we will put the cleaning disc in here cleaning disc is getting a little ratty we'll switch the input to one that you can see there we go let this boot up into IMD again I don't even know why I shut the power off to be honest I unplug and plug the cables on this these drives all the time while the power it's powered up and it doesn't really matter at least with this controller and stuff from a termination perspective I can't remember if you can disable the termination with a jumper it might be possible but I think these terminate the floppy cable not with 150 ohms which they should be terminated with it's something more like 10K or 4.7 K or whatever so if you add two Drives together and they both have termination resistors it just adds up and it's not that big a deal if it's terminating with 150 ohms like it should when you connect two drives you're now at 75 ohms and that means that the floppy Drive controller has to push a lot more current than it would normally at 150 ohm and you're kind of out of spec at that point so at that point you should have termination on the the last drive only some of these drives have a t resistor here that allow you to disable the termination sometimes it's a little chip you have to remove but sometimes it's actually a jumper now three and a half inch drives I've never seen any termination jumpers or anything on those which kind of sucks okay we're going to do clean disc three times let this run through the cleaning cycle okay that's weird this drive is acting like it's a 40 track Drive see how it's like bumping into the bump stop there well that's weird I thought it says GFR on the back there which I thought that meant that it's a 40 track drive a double step is on okay well there's my problem I made a mistake right here in the settings off so now we do clean I'll just do one cleaning cycle this should do it properly yes okay okay there we go so we're good let's go for the 360k disc right here let's plug this disc in here and we do analyze oh yeah I hear the Dual speed working already so that's awesome there it is it's looking good so remember I can't really reliably read this disc though because if I go to like track 80 I think we should find a valid track around here somewhere there it is reading track 39 off this double density disk even though it thinks it's on track 78 but that's as expected okay so that's working um I already know the Dual speed is working because it was at 250 kilobits per second and it was reading the disk correctly there let's put the high density disk in here and we'll just do the same thing now I don't really do much more than what we're doing here for testing these drives it's all you really have to do um yeah there we go now we're looking good track 10. I'll just quickly go through these go to 60 we're at 70. jump back just make sure it like is you know Falls accurately onto the correct track if this mechanisms were gummed up and what would happen is when you move back and forth it would like fall into the wrong track and you know you'd be able to tell that right away by this hit H for the other head it's looking good yeah okay so we have another working Drive and that is freaking great and it's dual speed as well so there we go I'm just going to write it as dual speed JPI 1.2 you know mags and 96.80 so yes that's how I should have put it I usually like to write if it's a 360 or 1.2 just as I'm quickly looking through the drives I can find it sweet okay we have another working drive so that's two okay here is the next one this looks this is Tea Act yeah um looks similar to the other one it's the first one that is uh this has some Drive rails on it these look like they're from a 51 uh well 5170 actually so that's kind of cool looking at the back we should have the old GFR and we do this number looks different though so the PCB on the bottom is probably going to look a bit different and it doesn't I think it looks it looks basically exactly the same so we're going to do the same thing again boy this is kind of repetitive but um hey that's that's how it goes right let's zoom in and I will use my camera to see the eye jumper there it is there is the eye jumper Boop so here we go drive select one just make sure that's correct otherwise you might have a non-working drive we'll plug in the floppy cable here and we'll plug in the power okay power is connected now what we gotta do is press exit out of that we're going to use the cleaning floppy like we've been doing incidentally um you can put more IPA in those little zones right there okay we're gonna do c cleaning I didn't even check to see the head was moving correctly but that seems to be working well as this cleans I'm going to grab another drive here we got another Tea Act Drive there's a bunch of there's a couple other brands wait oh that's not tack that's not teak and that's not tiak okay but here's another Tea Act so we'll do that one next so that sounded good let's go to the this drive that's the high density disk here so we'll go a line now when it comes to like RPM and stuff for these TX drives it's not even adjustable there's a Servo motor with a sensor and everything so it's always going to be correct it can compensate like if you try to put drag on the motor it compensates perfectly until it can't anymore it doesn't have enough torque so we're looking good here and yep then we hit head so both heads are working back to two looks good let's swap over to 360k line I can hear it changing speeds so that's good there we go it's good so we'll go to 70 here okay and it's reading track 35 when it should be reading 70. so there you go it's half and if I put it in dual step mode I think it will work maybe not in the alignment thing though I can't remember let's let's just for Grants we'll just test that so we're going to hit double step on and we're going to go back to a line and let's see if this now reads correctly you know where the tracks aren't misaligned okay so we're gonna hit three for 30. no so you still thinks it's on track 30 but it's only reading track 15 off the disk and that's because this mode doesn't double step it kind of ignores that setting uh okay there's a way to do it s you push the S key in here okay so we're gonna hit R for recalibrate there we go now it's working so it thinks it's on track 30 because it says T30 to top and now it's actually in the correct position for track 30. and if we hit 40 it's not going to work but I'll have to hit minus for 39. yeah we're good okay so that like I said you can do double step in here you have to do it separately all right so we have another working drive so that's cool um I should take these off because I don't need those on there because it makes these harder to stack I like kind of Stack these up on their sides and having this little rail on there which of course I will keep because I don't even know if this you know is for a clone or what but um get off there but I'll put them in my little bin I have a little bin that I keep full of like things like Drive rails now incidentally I did design a 3D printable Drive rail I did this really early on when I first got my 3D printer years and years ago and it's on thingiverse so if you do need a 3D printed Drive rail you can make your own okay there we go dual speed JPI teac drives they Rock so we're up to three at work and all three are dual speed okay so this drive here is in a bag does that mean it's unused oh I don't think so this is a Ziploc bag and um wow so this does look a little different it is a Tea Act but notice this PCB here is much smaller the other ones are kind of like extended further does this move oh yeah the head the whole head thing looks different too what is this it's still a GFR so it's still a high density Drive oh okay I think this is one of the ones that doesn't support dual speed look at this PCB here DC that jumper is on the other ones there's the U1 jumper where's the freaking Drive select settings oh wait look um yeah drive one drive two and drive three there's no Drive zero it's right there with no oh okay yeah I see so that pin right there is drives to like zero so you move this jumper over to get drives like zeros that means it still can work on uh one of these older machines but let's just take a look and see I mean obviously there's no pins installed so yeah something to do with the ready and the disk change signal here the U1 is there although oh that's IU so I wonder if that's that's a dual speed jumper there we're going to try that I don't know what E2 is uh either way this looks a lot different and look at the year here 1993. so let's grab a jumper we're gonna see if this IU jumper right here actually does the Dual speed so here we go this is a high density disk it is not changing speed um oh I put the double density Drive in there okay so see how it's running at 300 kilobits per second so this is a single speed drive all right well anyways there we go so our first working 1.2 Meg drive that is um not double speed that's a that's a bit of a bummer I really do enjoy those dual speed drives okay I've been riding on this side here I'm going to put single speed here now if you happen to know how to run this in dual speed like you saw something on there that I missed let me know please 96 TPI slash 80 track all right that is the fourth drive now uh is there another Tea Act in here I think we have a couple more TX here's another one and it's in a Ziploc bag just like the other one okay so this one can't see it yet but this looks like one of the older ones it's got the uh bigger PCB here heads move nice and smoothly no issues there and I think we're gonna have the Dual speed yes we do I got the jumper here let's uh zoom in on this there is I there it is right there I'll get that on there oh what's going on here I think there's a bent pin oh yeah there is okay that should do it okay there we go it's on there it's a little crooked Zoom back out flip this over hook up the power just make sure you don't force it on the wrong way because the obviously the power supply is energized right now connect that we're going to get the cleaning disc everyone knows the drill at this point pop a little bit of the IPA in there it's a good chance these drives don't even it's making a weird noise okay clean three steps okay that's weird noise by I don't know just had a little resonance sound there but I don't hear it now okay while this does that do we have another Tea Act no we do not I think that is the last teac drive the rest of these oh uh nope these are different brands okay there we go that should be clean let's hear the Dual speed nature of this thing it's kind of making a clicky noise oh I'm not sure this drive is working properly [Music] yeah I know I think there's a problem here it's not reading the disc either all right first drive we're gonna have to try to look into here to see what's going on I'm thinking there might be some crap on the heads I mean that really looks fine I don't see anything on there but I'm gonna try cleaning this manually here see if there's just junk on there okay we're gonna put a little like cleaning stick here what can happen is if the heads get kind of clogged up with magnetic material from Bad discs that can cause issues I know you're not gonna be able to see very clearly what I'm doing here I'm just trying to carefully just ensure oh no the heads are like really clean so I'm not sure what's going on exactly yeah I don't see anything there's like no no weird residue or anything on there hmm I'm gonna put my microphone near the disc so when I close the drive listen to the sound it makes [Music] that is definitely like an unhappy Drive sound right there let's try testing the RPM here sounds like it's not working correctly and I couldn't tell you why look it's not even able to test the RPM let's see on the bottom what we see so there could be caps I mean there are a bunch of caps on here though they could be problematic I'm just going to double check that the rest of the jumpers are correct do they match the other drives that's the question we have three other drives that have the exact same controller as this oh scratching the thing yeah everything is configured exactly the same so I don't think it's that now one thing I'm noticing is look at this little box here what it's like covered in some kind of Gunk now you might think it might be like a leaky cap or something but the Caps they don't look like they've leaked the whole drives in pretty good shape so Ron drives like one so let's make sure that's correct these caps here they seem okay I mean if you saw like brown Gunk and stuff that could be a problem but this machine this drive here obviously is not reading anything okay so this cable right here is the speed control cable make sure it's in there correctly this is for the heads and the heads are seeking so we know that's not a problem program is complaining there that we have a non-formatted disk here I'm going to hit the speed oh it's running at a slower speed there faster speed now when we look at the heads here this is the cabling for the heads let's take a closer look with the zoom lens there all looks correct like it's connected correctly so nothing looks out of the ordinary things look okay as well like there's the spring right there this is for the spring tension which is absolutely required for that to work I'll grab another drive we'll just compare the way the spring tension is so this is another drive and you can see there it's in that same little Notch right there and on that one yeah it looks the same it's in the same exact little Notch there I think I'm gonna have to mark this drive as a future repair attempt and have to be honest everyone I've never had any luck repairing drives I've had like the odd TX drive not work like this one and I've never really figured out what was the problem they just they just were like doing actually I think the one I had was doing exactly like this it just was running but I wasn't getting any any signal in the computer now I know a lot more about using my oscilloscope my analog scope to try to like read the signals and stuff on this this is where the heads are connected problem is with this drive the older drives it's really a lot easier to work on the sugar type drives like the uh the old full High drives because they have discrete components but on this everything is in this one chip the heads are red and they go into there and that's it if the amplifiers in here are bad then you're out of luck then that thing is just totally dead the only thing I want to see is what is this blue part that's all gunked up looking looks like it's some kind of capacitor it's got a C marking next to it so that could be the problem although the fact that's over here probably has something to do with the head stepper assembly because as I said the heads are connected right here and the traces just go straight into this IC right there all right um I think I'm just gonna mark this as uh I'm gonna put an X right here and say no read and we can take this writing off if I get this thing working let's get this floppy out of here pop that off pump that off it does sound like I said it has that weird high-pitched noise which kind of indicates that there's something going on with the heads here but everything looks fine all right first drive down so we're at four drives working right or three drives working yeah we're at four drives working and one not working next Drive is this one I just grabbed a random drive it's an anti-static bag so that's nice this is uh well it's got a light color bezel with a dark lever on it that's kind of cool a bit unusual someone wrote p on there who makes this drive here chin on this is a chin on drive an fz506 very common Drive I am 99.9 sure that this is a high density disk drive so it is an 80 track 40 96 track per inch look at this everyone look at the Carnage right here what the heck happened how did this even happen those are like I don't think they stick out unless someone like was angry and like ripped this out of a computer I don't even know wow I think what I need to try to do is loosen this PCB up bending some of those pins back because they don't look happy the way they are there all right uh there's that cover off and there is the PCB maybe there's some writing on there we can tell what these are oh look at that you can so I think TM is Terminator I've got the drive select here and there's like the DC just change ready ms1 MS2 but we could definitely see some serious damage that's occurred here okay so I'm gonna try to bend these back somehow there's a jumper there that's been smashed all right there we go it's not perfect but um should be good enough for getting jumpers on let's see what that first jumper is uh that would be TM so Terminator I think this has a selectable Terminator so we're going to put the drive select one jumper on which um these are the little jumpers by the way like are on hard drives and stuff like that all right so we are left with U1 ms1 Drive uh dischange ready MS2 now I don't know if any of these support or you know any of these will facilitate a dual speed operation of this drive I'm just going to run this I think with the PCB off here it's going to be easier for me to try to get jumpers on and off of there I happen to have some of those little small Jumpers in my little whatever we went that little um thing full of jumpers so um let's plug this in to the system this is fine the way it is there it's held up enough it's not going to short on anything back to this View and um well we gotta do the cleaning disc don't we let's grab the cleaning disc I should see if this we heard the head move so I think it's okay we'll find out in a second pop this in spinning Okay C for cleaning it's definitely an 80 track drive so high density well I mean it might not be high density still you can have 80 track drives that are only double density we'll figure that out briefly or shortly when we try to read this disc here okay so that cleaned all right oops knocking everything over this isn't even in the view of the camera so alignment so this is high density disc so if it's working it should no it's not freaking working either interesting interesting is that the wrong says uh 250 kilobits per second but it's not able to read anything now it is selecting the drive the lights on so that's a good sign that means the computer if I hit escape the light went off and it stopped spinning no I may need to try to find some manuals here but I kind of remember the drives like to jumper that's there was there was another jumper over here so may well require something else that's um not on there so what I need to do I am just losing track of everything right here where is my little thing of jumpers the lid is right here okay I found it you can hear some of the small little mini jumpers that it needs I think these are the right ones now what I'm trying to do is look at the other drives here to see if there's any others that are like this and I can copy the way the jumpers are configured none of them are but I think I have a drive a chin on drive like this I'm gonna go look for it no no I don't have it handy I know I have one of these drives I think it's inside one of my computers so I think what I'm just going to do is put jumpers on it randomly I suppose I should just do some Googling and try to figure out you know what the jumpers are but let's put one on the dcry PIN okay there's dcry see if that made a difference nope now as I was saying when I first saw those smash jumpers it looked like there was a jumper over in this area over here I don't know if it was just like a placeholder jumper okay I put one on that strap whatever that is lime oh it's running in dual speed mode now I could hear it speeding up and slowing down let's put in the double density disk now that it's in dual speed mode now it's definitely not reading anything though let's try one more time here it's reading so okay so I'm pushing s so we're gonna hit recal so it's going to be in double step mode so it's reading the double density disk correctly and it's running at 300 kilos per second though which I thought it was dual speed but if we go to the test RPM here it will be at 360 RPM but I can hear it changing speed but I think what it's doing is I think it's in the wrong speed so I think what it's doing is it's it's reversed so it's running at 300 RPM in the high density mode and it's running at 360 in the low density mode so that's fascinating the Tea Act Drive had a setting for like that reversal thing but did this one have that setting let's pop this jumper off I think it was this last one I put on here so it's still reading the disc let's try again it's not running in dual speed mode now okay so it's reading it's reading this disk so why isn't it able to read the high density disk now that I took that jumper off it's not running in dual speed mode this is definitely an 80 track drive but it's running at 360 RPM so that means it's got a support high density mode 500 kilobits per second but now it's just it's not able to read it unless there's another jumper that I need to set like maybe there's that high density signals not getting through or something like that all right so the jumper that seemed to be double speed was MS2 and then there's an ms1 let's put the ms1 jumper on that could be the Dual speed in the other direction oh you can't see anything so I put the other jumper next to the ready one there let's hit test RPM let's not even spinning now it's selected but the motor is not spinning let's get that jumper off of there so ms1 oh you know why it's not spinning because there's no disc in the drive come on okay it's Ryan double speed drives mode but it's in the wrong mode so I'm gonna put that jump so let me put this jumper back on ms-1 so MS2 is on there as well they're both on there let's see what happens now okay there we go this is the high density disk and you can see there 500 kilobits per second it says double density if you could ignore that that's just it is double density but it it's running 500 kilobits per second so if we do a for a line we should be getting the correct track reading here sweet it's working let's do heads okay both heads are good track 70. it's working okay now if we put in the double density disk seems like when you have ms1 and MS2 on there together I think we're going to get double density working here at 250 kilobits yeah I can hear it running slower at the 250 now no no that's a lie oh I see what's happening okay this drive seems to no no I don't actually see what's happening exactly definitely sounds like it's running at the correct RPM see in the settings here 300 to 250 let's change this let's see if that I don't think that had any effect on the analyze mode though now but it's stuck let me make sure I have the disk in correctly so this is the double density disc and it was in the correct correct way let me take off this MS2 jumper oh look at that no no no no no now it's that's not right is it let's try that again okay it's not running in double speed mode now now it's just running at 360 RPM it's running at 300 kilobits per second there so that's reading oh got a phone call all right that was a phone call I got to go outside just a second uh let's see if this is working this is the high density disk okay so it's working I'm going to pause the recording and I'll be back alrighty I am back I was outside I had to do something out there for a second uh where did we leave off I think we left off with this drive fully working with both high density and low density okay so there's the high density Drive working for disk that is and let's go to the double density disk and let's see if this will works so I think I think the double speed nature of this is not going to work well specifically because it seems to be inverted from the way that the Tea Act drives are so when this thing is trying to read high density instructor from the controller let me just get this started here then it's running at 300 RPM for high density which is wrong and now it's running at 300 kilobits per second so it's still running at 360. so it seems like what's needed on the jumpers Let's uh flip this down so it looks like what we have on there right now is ms1 so I currently have the TM jumper oh so you can't really see it TM jumper right here is said DS1 is set and ms1 is set and so is this dcry jumper I don't know if that one's really needed but here we are we can kind of see it there so TM jumper termination DS1 for drivers like one and then we have ms1 and then the DC there's still this one more U1 jumper but I don't really know how that works so I'm going to leave this as is because it's it's functional I just need to kind of put it back together and uh yeah we have a working drive and it's kind of got the cool light color look which I kind of dig it'd be nice if this was dual speed it's nearly a dual speed drive so that's a bit of a shame so we'll get that off get this off so I could put this all back together that's an extra jumper all right the cover's on so that is one working drive but as for the double speed it almost wants to work but it doesn't quite work so if you happen to know how to configure this thing for the double speed to work in the correct way let me know because I would like to have this as double speed but luckily I have enough of those TX drives anyways so not a big deal that this one doesn't quite work that way alrighty so the count is up to five working drives and one drive that does not work now this drive here is a brand I don't quite recognize we'll look at the back in a second to see the label let's get these screws off the side here okay on the back we got a Panasonic ju-475-4 AK Dom akj that is and how do the jumpers look oh it's um this is a dirty drive a dirty dirty Drive so if if it works um I'll have to do some more cleaning on this thing oh oh look at that what a mess what a freaking mess this thing was obviously in some kind of a computer that definitely was a dust magnet okay anyways it looks like it's got a little Bend there just a bit of damage so to speak let's see what we can see from a Jumper's perspective on here all right we got all sorts of jumpers there kind of hard to tell what they are though Drive select I don't know we'll just go with the fact that it's probably in the stock configuration this looks like a termination termination resistor I think are these little capacitors they're a little tiny caps no those are test points look at those test points how freaking fancy is that oh and there's a whole bunch more jumpers right here so almost surely this thing supports double dual speed mode but wow wow oh that's just terrible it's interesting how the mechanism there kind of reminds me of a three and a half inch disk drive doesn't it but look at this that's gross all right let's do the cleaning disc well we got to plug the power in right plug in the power first sounds like it's doing its thing lots and lots of IPA I don't even know if there's an 80 track drive we'll find out if it's banging into the bump stop it's working it's an 80 track Drive sweet so there we go it's battle hardened and dirty but it does work now um I'm not going to look for the data sheet on this thing to see if it's running in dual speed or not but uh I guess if you happen to know that this can run in double speed let me know that's another working Drive even though it's dirty as all next up who makes this this is a neutronics drive all right so they made the mechanisms in the Commodore 64 1541s um probably has yep they look just like this this is yellowed but uh they're of course a dark brown color on the Commodore but neutronics yeah they make pretty reliable drives in fact gosh look how bad the top looks just gross let me get that you find I have a I have a cloth here I want to just see if I can clean that a little bit because if that's dirt or rust let's see dirt or rust everyone what do you think looks like it's looks like it's rust I guess well looks like it's both combination of dirt and rust anyhow as I was saying with the neutronix drives and it does say neutronics right there as well I found these to be really really reliable I have a 360k neutronics drive it's a sugar interface that works on PCS double-sided and when I have disks that are marginal what I did at one point I had I was trying to Archive some discs like you know make some uh backups and I took a marginal disk and I tried all my 360k drives like the different brands teac and neutronics and stuff like that and I found the neutronics drive it just was able to discern more bits and read that disk that marginal disk better than all the other drives I have so I actually marked it as like my archival drive and that's the one I use now this one it says it's uh there's the model number right there d509v high density or not I don't know we'll just have to plug it in and see what happens um it's very dirty inside wow look at this filthy filthy filthy in there does the head move okay though oh it's it's not that's not happy I'm gonna have to try to clean this a little bit before we start with this one it is moving but it sounds very unhappy scratchy sounding let's get this cover off okay covers off yeah that is a dirty Drive whoa I'm just gonna go and spray some compressed air in here um to blow this dust out I'm Gonna Take It Outside to do that though I don't want to put all that nasty dust into the basement yeah look at that yeah all right we are back and um it's not perfect because I didn't use a brush I just used a can of compressed air but it looks a whole lot better now this does still actually move without issue but I'm gonna put a little bit of bearing oil on it there's some bearing oil here just to kind of uh hope this slides a little better does it wear the bearings there's the bearings right here so a little bearing oil right there other side is just slides on it there's no bearing and I can see here there's another bearing we'll just put a little drop right there and move this back and forth oh yeah way smoother right now that that's way better okay time for the disc all right neutronics you're a good drive you're totally a good drive yeah this is a good drive it works and um from a jumper perspective we didn't really talk about that let's look at the jumpers here so there's the drives like jumper it's on DS1 and you notice there there are these jumpers over here so it's possible it supports some kind of like double speed mode I don't know let's flip it over the connector here looks okay but it could be the other side that's really dirty does this have any info here about jumpers not really anyhow it can be really hard to find the data sheets for these like exact drives this exact model number which was as we said we can get this to focus d509v if anyone can find the data sheet or service manual for this drive and then maybe we can like decipher if these jumpers here will allow a double speed or dual speed mode then let me know I have a feeling that that is not the case and that this thing will only run in single speed mode all right um I'm not going to put the cover back on at the moment because I need to do more cleaning but I'll do that afterwards we can write on here that this is a good drive though so I'm going to put 1.2 and a tick mark and obviously we'll just write 96 TPI I mean it's kind of funny when I write 1.2 it's kind of a given that it's a 96 track per inch and 80 track drive but I like to write it on there anyways okay so that is another working drive we are up to one two three four five six seven working drives one non-working drive we had one that was finicky and this who makes this this drives a nice shape oh someone wrote something on the side here but it wasn't me it's an Epson drive an SD 600 pretty sure this is a high density drive that kind of sounds familiar oh so this one okay take a look at this everyone this has got an old termination resistor on it so you just take that out and then that will um you know take away the Terminator so I'm thinking this is the drive select there it's on Drive select one then we got these straps here S1 S2 and S3 and those and these and there's even one over here so lots of configurability with this particular Drive closed up so I can't really move the heads manually but uh should be okay we'll just uh plug in the power okay power's in plug in the interface cable there we go this drive works there we go 96 track per inch 80 tracks and it's working so far we've had a really good ratio uh those torques yeah that's a Torx bit do I recognize this drive let me look at the front kind of looks like a neutronix but it's a little a little different ah okay there it is it's a Mitsubishi MF 504c-368u we've had a whole bunch of different types of drives there's a date code right there 1993. uh it's certainly Dusty isn't it look at this not a lot of Jumper so Drive change DS1 ds0 are you kidding there's only two Drive select jumpers that's pretty rude so if you want to use this on like a machine that's got four disk drives like a something that uses a sugar interface that's not going to work there might be a way to like you know just hot wire it from these little connectors here uh Sr DC there's the FG I don't know one and three whatever that is and then these two SB and SS look at that prevent static discharge sure sure okay all right it's got that stepper motor thing that's like kind of like a three and a half inch disk drive at least there's some grease on there and it's not incredibly filthy we got some surface mount caps there do they look like they've leaked this one this one does so that right there could be causing an issue I don't know is that just dirt 100 microfarad 10 volts meanwhile this one 33 micro farad at 33 volts so that could be a problem right there this cable looks like it's not in all the way anyways all right let's plug it in and see if it works it's working so let's just disk drive works well too that is amazing and I guess um you know because there's wow this is kind of a limited drive as I said because it's missing the extra Drive select jumpers but um hey anyways all right wow there we go so putting this down on the pile which I know you can't see we are down to nine working five and a quarter inch drives and then we just had this one drive right here which was this Tea Act Right Here remember this thing spun but it wouldn't read that will be a future repair attempt and we have two quick three and a half inch disk drives left here and these are probably just gonna work one of these is a Tea Act Right Here tiac fd235 HF I don't love this particular drive because it doesn't even have Drive select at all nothing so you could like hot wire it oh here we go there's Drive select one and drives like zero so to change the try select on this you have to remove this little jumper link it's a zero Ohm resistor and place it right here so this allows you to have either drives like zero or drives like one some other strap right here has four S3 you know who knows how this works the older versions of these drives have a lot more jumpers available to them and you could configure them to work on like Amigas and stuff um by moving some jumpers around and it's possible with this one you could as well by you know reconfiguring these straps here and any other straps no these are caps those caps could be leaky but they're through holes that's a good thing this thing is dirty it's probably really dusty inside but I wouldn't be surprised if it completely works because these drives are just reliable clean three times now remember these drives run at 300 RPM all the time uh there are some very specialized drives that run at a faster speed but pretty much all the normal PC drives are always just going to be 300 RPM okay need a disc here's one I don't know what this disc is are pet Wreckers I'm not sure where this came from it is high density though pop that in there let's see how this works 18 sectors so double that is 36 looking good try the other head so we're on head one that's good head zero is good go to track 70. it's looking good track 30. that's looking good okay so this this drive Works um I was gonna say if you can read hide and seek disks you can read double density disk same number of tracks and everything it just runs at um 250 kilobits per second and a little a little switch that's in there is what determines the difference I do like to write on this here I'm just going to put 1.44 and a tick mark just so I know it's not like a 720k drive those are just pretty rare okay so yeah as we said this is the drive we just tested TX fd235 HF this one here 235 HF but see how it says 62.91 you that's kind of like the a sequence number or something like that so yes it's a 29 whatever it's different it's a different Drive does it look the same on the bottom though the layout is different if I recall here so there's S4 S5 S3 or the drive selects oh it's right here it actually has jumpers there we go drive slow like zero Drive select one you can't control the termination you can't configure anything else I definitely have other tact drives that look just like this that have way more jumpers which allow you to configure for the Amiga and definitely it works cleaning desk time cleaning three times sounds like it's working okay I hope anyone watching this isn't like hey you're not testing like in DOS you know that doesn't show that it's fully working I can guarantee you that like what we're doing here in IMD is all you need to do for testing discs when it's working in here it's working in DOS for sure 100 percent go both heads track 70. it's working both heads we're good we're golden fully functional get that off there 1.44 and a tick mark alrighty there we have it so test and try we have two working three and a half inch drives we have one bad tiac five and a quarter inch disc there just drive and then we have all of these working five and a quarter inch drives they are all 1.2 megabytes keep grabbing these up here that's three four and we got five there we go so those are like not TX and then we got one teac um double speed Drive two Tea Act double speed drives three Tea Act double speed drive that one has a red LED the other two are green and then we got four but this one's a single speed drive with a green LED so yes we got nine working five and a quarter inch disk drives one bad one and two three and a half that is a good haul I gotta say I am pretty pleased by that they're all in here with a few loose screws so there we go I hope you enjoyed this um video hopefully the camera's focusing on me and not these disc drives yeah it looks like it is I hope you enjoyed this video of me testing out these disk drives test and try scintillating content but you know what this is the kind of stuff that when you work on Virtual computers like I do and I have you know lots of stuff I need to sort through it and figure out what works and what doesn't work and with this non-working disk drive you know we can I can try to make a repair video out of that I mean I I have very low confidence I can make that drive work but at least I know all these drives are good some need a little extra cleaning and whatever but they they're all absolutely working which is fantastic it really makes me excited especially to get three double speed drives confirmed working double speed drives that can run at both speeds that means that these work great as 96 track per inch disk drives or 80 track drives in older machines like trs80 model 3s and stuff like that can absolutely use these and that is really cool I smell a little bit of mustiness coming off these disk drives my smell is not super good after human malware it's it's mostly good but it's I notice it's just a little bit less sensitive I guess as the right word the Acuity is not quite as good as it was anyhow if you enjoyed this video I'd appreciate a thumbs up if you didn't you know what to do huge thanks to my patrons their names are scrolling beside the screen they literally make it possible that I make these videos now so that is amazing they're rock stars you can become a patron at the link in the description below and patrons get early access to videos plus the higher tiers get behind the scenes stuff like live streams and things like that I've done one live stream so far and that was uh really fun actually I think there was like 60 something people on there um at the peak of the live stream and this was like a last minute thing so I was kind of shocked that many folks joined anyways yeah that is going to be that so yeah comment down below subscribe all the usual stuff and stay healthy stay safe I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement ][

Views: 59,948

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Id: xtHwYQyhkAc

Length: 70min 59sec (4259 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2023