I recently changed the rifa cap on my old Apple IIe and after putting everything back together my duodisk drive is constantly spinning and has a red light on at all times.
I am pretty new to this, so I am not sure what the issue could be. Before changing the rifa everything worked fine.
Make sure the drive is plugged in correctly. Also meter all your power supply voltages to make sure they are in spec. Changing the RIFA caps shouldn't break that, but if you made a mistake somewhere it is possible.
When replacing the RIFA the neutral wire on the power supply was damaged, but I believe I repaired it correctly. I also wasn't positive which way the cap was supposed to go I just tried to copy how the old one was facing. Could this be part of the problem?
The red power light does turn on and is solid
Meter the output of the supply. If it is putting out the wrong voltages it can blow things out. Ideally power supplies should be tested with a dummy load before being plugged into the motherboard.
Those caps are not polarized so it wouldn't matter which way you put it in.
That's good to know. That takes one thing off my list of possible issues.
Couple things to check. Does hitting ctrl-reset stop the drive? Also try re-seating the drive controller card and the cable to the duodisk.
Yes that does stop the drive and the light turns off. But when I put the disk in nothing loads. I also tried putting the disk in first and then powering on. The game title screen loads and then the drive makes a loud sound and the game stays on the title screen.
I did check the cord and the card
I just changed out the power supply to a new one just in case the work I did before was the issue. It did not fix the problem. The disk drive is still constantly spinning with the red light on. Is there anything else it could be? Has anyone else has this issue?
Sounds more like a bad disk or dirty head. If it partially loads a game then the Apple II is probably OK. As a last resort, you could also try swapping the two duodisk drives.
Sounds good. I will clean it up tomorrow. Hopefully that's all it needs
So I took apart the duodisk and cleaned everything including the lens. It is still doing the same thing. Disk drive one just constantly runs. Would the next step be to start changing chips? I know the cord works and the duodisk worked great before I changed the power supply.
I would just swap drive one and two in the Duodisk. Drive one gets used much more than drive two and therefore is more likely to develop problems first. If it works that way you have isolated the problem.