Floppy drive problems

Yesterday I performed surgery on a mates (Clint246Clint on here) Mpc 60 mk1 which had a faulty backlight, floppy drive and a crack in one of the inverter boards copper channels

The back light was easy

The inverters faulty pcb strip was bridged with wire to bypass the crack in the pcb strip

When I went to replace the floppy drive, I attempted two drives that worked perfectly in my 60 (all cables correctly connected) but nothing happened, I tryed a new (without twist) floppy cable and still nothing.

After a bit of head scratching I decided to remove the scsi board (upgrade) from the 60 and tryed again.

It turned out his floppy drive was not the problem and now worked perfectly.

The os in this particular 60 supports scsi and the cables are near mint
Has anyone else had this problem?

It is something to consider before going to the trouble of searching for floppy drives

I am guessing a small fuse/resistor on the scsi board may be the problem

What is the issue with the floppy drive? Not powering up? Powering up but not reading disks?

The floppy is independent of SCSI and shouldn't matter unless there is a power issue. I would measure the 5VDC line while the floppy drive is running to see if it's getting dragged down. That would point to a power supply issue or another fault on 5V elsewhere in the machine. Could be leaky caps or a weak regulator in the power supply.

Also check the power connector for the CPU PCB to see if it has a good solder joint -- I've seen a few in the poast that have cracked solder joints.

The floppy was powering up fine but when you attempted to do anything (load,save,format ect) the mpc would just cut back to the main screen.

All solder joints were ok on the main boards and the scsi board, the fuses and cables were also ok.

The 60 is working perfectly without the scsi board

As the scsi board sits inbetween the connections of the bottom and top board I can see how that may have a fualt that upsets the floppy???

I also have a problem with my floppy drive.

I figured it just needed replacing so I bought replacement drives (including one from VST) but that doesn't work either.

Jumper settings are correct.
Floppy drive should work since it was a VST one.
Tried different IDE cables.

Still nothing. It takes a while when I try to format a floppy before I get the error that the floppy is damaged.

No clue what the problem might be.

ReckOne wrote:I also have a problem with my floppy drive.

I figured it just needed replacing so I bought replacement drives (including one from VST) but that doesn't work either.

Jumper settings are correct.
Floppy drive should work since it was a VST one.
Tried different IDE cables.

Still nothing. It takes a while when I try to format a floppy before I get the error that the floppy is damaged.

No clue what the problem might be.

What drive are you using? This error message pops up when the drive is not set up correctly.

What drive are you using?
What are the jumpers set to?

Have you tryed the floppy cable both ways around?

Was the drive listed as plug and play or does it need the RDY mod?

This thread contains all the info of what I tried...

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=77563

TEAC drive purchased from VST (plug&play).
Verified jumper settings with VST and Forat.
When the IDE cable was not correct (other way round) the light came on and stayed on if I remember correctly.

Might try swapping some parts with my friend's 60mkII if that's possible...

ReckOne wrote:This thread contains all the info of what I tried...

http://mpc-forums.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=77563

TEAC drive purchased from VST (plug&play).
Verified jumper settings with VST and Forat.
When the IDE cable was not correct (other way round) the light came on and stayed on if I remember correctly.

Might try swapping some parts with my friend's 60mkII if that's possible...

Ok I am no expert on this subject, but in the last few weeks I have been successful in modifying 3 types of drive (all required some work on the pcb. It sounds to me like the drive itself needs to be changed to RDY

I seem to remember seeing problems with VST drives

What is the drive type In full ?



If all else fails mate... I have one spare drive that is plug and play (I have done the work on it )

Scrap that, it litterally just sold on eBay

From what I read just now it's possible my IDE cable is the problem.

When I bought the mpc the dude said the floppy drive wasn't working so I figured that was normal considering the age of the machine.

But when I wanted to replace it and opened up the machine, the IDE cable was missing. So I used another one. I tried a couple of other ones, including the one from my MPC2000XL.

I've tried a couple of drives that should be working with the correct jumper settings so I don't think all of them are broken.

Thanks for the info!

Make sure cable doesn't have a twist in it that reverses a few cables