Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Marten van de Kraats <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>I guess it [a Phaser 800 external floppy drive from Warp Nine
>Engineering Inc., my comment - MJ] must have something to do with the
>way system 6 handles (external) floppy drives. System 6 does allow
>some stuff that is not possible with system 7 like ejecting startup
>disks, so you might expect some other things to work differently too.
>Of course the people who build the phaser 800 did a bad job, because
>peripherals like external floppy drives are supposed to keep on
>functioning properly when a newer system version is used.
Nice guess, and makes sense, but this is what my experiments show:
On either of two Classics, the drive doesn't make a thing - no sound, no
LEDs flash, no screen message, just totally inert on disk insertion,
like it wasn't connected at all. This is very odd in my opinion.
On one SE/30 and one Classic II it whirrs, blinks, scrapes and hums, but
fails to read any diskettes, pronouncing them unreadable and suggesting
formatting them (which fails).
On one SE FDHD it works normally under both 6.0.8 and 7.1 but can't be
booted from - it boots half-way from a System 6 diskette, aborts
abruptly without a dialogue, ejects the floppy, resumes booting from
the HD, and presents me with a misaligned screen, shifted strongly up
(no wrap-around) and a bit to the right (with wrap-around). This is
totally reproducible (and looks very odd, screen dumps exist). Can't
shut the computer down gracefully after this, because the menus are
off-screen. Actually, the only thing I can do is to open and close the
trash can. A double boot - by immediately re-inserting the floppy
after the first aborted boot - results in a screen shifted twice as
much upward but the same extent to the right.
On another SE FDHD the drive works normally and can be booted from
normally (using the same floppy as above).
In no case did it make any difference what system version (6.0.8,
7.0.1, 7.1) was used; in every case the identity of the computer
mattered, albeit in a confusing pattern.
MacEnvy and Tech Tool (TT 1.0.3, IIRC) both reported that the external
floppy was a 400 K drive, even when the programmes themselves were run
from an 800 K floppy in the very same drive. Tattle Tech declared it an
800 K Sony.
I have plenty more Macs to try it on, but got tired of it. I guess that
voodoo must be involved somehow, and I'll leave it at that. It is an
amusing artefact all the same, but with limited usefulness. As
mentioned before, however: totally reliable on the Plus, and good for
copying worn-out 800 K floppies that can no longer be read in an
internal drive.
I hope someone found this peculiar story amusing.
Furthermore, at 23:31 -0700 on 16/09/01, Jane Thompson wrote:
>I have a IIci that I believe has a floppy drive that is dying. It
>hadn't been started up for over 2 years. Every disk that I put in it
>prompts the message "This disk is unreadable by this Macintosh. Do you
>want to initialize the disk?" For the heck of it, I said yes once, but
>"Initialization failed" resulting in the disk being ejected.
to which the pickle answered
>You might have a dirty drive. Try cleaning it up a bit. Directions
>are in the FAQ.
That is a pretty sure bet. I've seen this phenomenon about twenty times
and it has always been fixable by removal of dirt (sometimes also
foreign objects of varying kinds) and lubrication of the sliding
parts of the insert/eject mechanism and heads. I don't want to argue
with those who recommend advanced and fancy brands of grease, these may
be better and last longer, but it is also quite fixable with a few tiny
drops of fine-mechanical oil. I use a glass syringe with a thin, bent
needle to apply the oil without stripping the whole mechanism. It is a
really simple and quick procedure and will keep the drive working for
several years. Never have I come across a floppy drive that has
suffered from more exotic ailments like misaligned heads, not even in a
recent case when someone had used great force to retrieve a stuck
floppy and bent the whole chassis out of shape. I'm not saying that
misaligned or worn-out heads don't exist, they have just been very
uncommon in my personal experience.
/Mikael
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