Apple II floppy Disk Issues (Pulling my hair out)

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Apple II floppy Disk Issues (Pulling my hair out)

I've had a couple of Apple IIe computers in the closet for a while. About 2 months ago I had a craving to get an Apple IIe up and running. I hooked everything up and plugged in a uni-disk drive and everything ran like a champ. I only had a few floppies but I found the extra cool utility c2t that turns disk images into wave files which I'm able to play through the tape drive jack and write back to floppy. I have plenty of blanks so I was able to build an instant software collection quick.

I played around with the Apple for about a week and had no problems.Then I got busy on another project for a few weeks. a couple of days ago I turned on the Apple ][e and everything seemed OK, but then I started having disk problems. First I started getting the can't load prodos message. I only have 64k of ram so I using older versions of prodos. Then the computer would boot sometimes and sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes the drive will just spin forever. I cleaned the head on the drive I was using but it didn't seem to help.

Then it got to where the computer hardly boots at all, the drive just keeps spinning and nothing happens on the screen. I followed some instructions on the web and checked the RPMs of the drive and it was where it was suppose to be. I also tried a couple of different drives without and changes. The last thing I tried was swapping out the disk drive card with a disk II card and I plugged in a disk 2 drive. Same issues.

I'm really frustrated about this. It feels like every apple item I touch dies. Can anyone recommend some other things I can try? I would really like to get it working reliably.

Thanks,
Jeffrey

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Re: Apple II floppy Disk Issues (Pulling my hair out)

Hello,

Do you have another machine to test the Unidisk & Disk II drives on it ?
Have you done the c2t process once again to see if a fresh new created disk is working ?

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Re: Apple II floppy Disk Issues (Pulling my hair out)

Hello retrocomputer22,

reading your posting sounds like a progresive event....
sounds a bit like that the problem started at the resurection and then started
to affect other parts of the computer.... maybe you can locate the affected parts
by checking out temperature of the chips on the mainboard......

If one or more chips get after few minutes hotter than you can accept by touching them with the hands
it might indicate the affected area and chips.....
checking the drive at another device might help to exclude the drive from the list of possible problems...

speedyG

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Re: Apple II floppy Disk Issues (Pulling my hair out)

I found a drive combination that is working for now. Is there a guide anywhere on net for servicing Apple 5.25 floppy drives?

I do find one thing curious. Why would one 5.25 drive give me a unable to load prodos v1.1 error but it loads other disks fine. But I have a 2nd drive that will boot the same prodos 1.1 disk fine on the same computer. To me it makes no sense.

Also I read somewhere that mac 880k floppy drives could be fitted into Apple IIgs drives cases and used on the IIgs. Does anyone know if this is true. I ask because my GS is down to one working drive but I have a bunch of mac drives.

Thanks,

Jeffrey

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Re: Apple II floppy Disk Issues (Pulling my hair out)

Is there a guide anywhere on net for servicing Apple 5.25 floppy drives?

Yes there is:
http://www.appleii-box.de/H084_1_AppleIIDiskService1.htm
and the following pages....
speedyG

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Re: Apple II floppy Disk Issues (Pulling my hair out)

Also if the disks that you used to put the software on were High Density, meant for 700k disk drives, that could cause problems too.

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Re: Apple II floppy Disk Issues (Pulling my hair out)

Also if the disks that you used to put the software on were High Density, meant for 700k disk drives, that could cause problems too.

HD is for 1.2M / 1.44M...The 720K diskettes are perfect for A2 5.25" media...

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