Hands on alignment of an Amiga disk drive

[@freesofia]

Super! I repair my Chinon FZ-354 with this tutorial! Thank's !

[@algizmo7079]

Atari ST owner/user; thanks for this 'reveal' of the theory and hackery of drive head alignment. Filed for when needed. ; )

[@twinshobbytwinshobby3863]

Awesome Video ! Best Regards from Bulgaria

[@saeidyazdani]

Great video! a couple of weeks ago I just bought a broken external drive on ebay listed as broken, it powers up but does nothing... I am gonna do what you did here :)

[@CRG]

Thanks glad you found it useful. Certainly try Amiga Test Kit and see how it reports the heads. If they are out start with the lower head. Some Amiga disk drives also need the capacitors replacing to bring them back so that's worth checking too. Please let me know how you get on.

[@techdept]

Great Video Glen. I’ll be referring back to this vid when u tackle a few of my own Amiga floppy drives.

[@CRG]

Thanks, glad to hear you enjoyed it and I hope it will be useful for you.

[@AS-ly3jp]

Great video! Thank you!

[@thromboid]

I successfully got my A1200's Panasonic drive working again this week. To get the track alignment, I rotated the stepper to find the extremes where it started to have errors, and set it at the midpoint. The track 0 sensor is harder, but the Greaseweazle software will tell you if it trips prematurely so you can estimate how far off it is (maybe ATK does too - same author). I used a stack of paper (a pad of small post-it-style flags) wedged between the sensor and the drive frame which let me adjust it by increments of about 0.09 mm, or about half a track, per sheet.

[@thromboid]

For leadscrew lubrication, Panasonic specifies Molykote EM-30L grease (PAO synthetic, PTFE and white solids, lithium thickener, no silicone). For the guide rod, they just say "oil", but I'd favour the silicone spray type.

[@thromboid]

Another nice thing about using a Greaseweazle (or similar) is that you can easily test the drive with other disk formats. When my drive was properly set up it could read original PC DD disks perfectly, whereas after my first alignment attempt it could read some Amiga original disks but not the PC ones.

[@sumo55sumo]

😃Wow lesson learnt on those screws! Glad to hear its nice and clean and maybe too clean without much grease! Looking forward to receiving it! Many thanks Glen!

[@CRG]

You're more than welcome. The drive is on its way back and hopefully it arrives safely for you to start enjoying some games again.

[@2008Overkill]

Helpful video thanks, I will try to fix my A600 drive tomorrow :)

[@Retroguyuk75]

I learnt a lot from this video my friend :).. I wont be touching those screws any time soon lol. I've never used the disk section of the Amiga test kit either so I know how that works now too. Cool :)..

[@CRG]

Thanks, glad to hear you enjoyed the video. Yeah don't be removing any screws that have glue on them. The disk section of ATK is certainly useful, this was the first time I used it for aligning a drive but it seemed to work well and was far easier than I initially thought.

[@protox07]

I like your videos

[@Explore531]

hello I noted this old video but just wondering I have the Amiga 500+ model and notice the head wont move with I insert hard disk any idea why this happening ?? thanks the model is F-354E REV A

[@CRG]

Could be the switches at the front of the drive are not working to detect the disk is inserted. Sometimes they get sticky with age and a little contact cleaner can bring them back. Beyond that the drives are known for bad caps so always worth swapping those out too.

[@Explore531]

@@CRG thanks IL check it out

[@stephenwhite506]

Commodore didn't make it easy for code in a custom boot block to know what drive it has been booted from. This is how I did it back in the day. The OS does give you a pointer to the IORequest for the boot drive. Then the trick is to loop through all possible floppy drives, with a loop index and open a new trackdisk device for each. You can then compare each trackdisk device's IORequest's io_Unit pointer to find the one that matches the io_Unit pointer for the IORequest passed in. The index for the current trackdisk can be used as the drive index that the floppy was booted from.

[@tokyogentleman]

it would be good to put lock tite on the screw tops after screwed in and corrected

[@CRG]

Yes, that would be useful to stop anyone from undoing it again in the future.

[@peddersoldchap]

Is the lower head soldered? I mean, what would it take to re-attach it?

[@simontay4851]

I have a pile of 3.5inch floppy drives on a shelf. About 10 of them. Various makes and models. Do you want any? They were out of old PCs so not specifically amiga drives.

[@simontay4851]

Im not sure what the difference is between an amiga FDD and a PC FDD.

[@CRG]

Thanks for the offer but I've also got a pile of spare pc drives. Other than Amiga drives being double density there is some signalling differences. You can convert a pc drive to work on an Amiga easily enough.

[@SirHackaL0t.]

Who thought that putting the lower head on top of the upper head in the head calibration tool is just wrong?

[@thromboid]

I think the logic is that the lower head is the first (head 0) and so it comes first. Single-sided drives only had a single head, of course, and it was typically beneath the disk.

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

I searched for "Amiga test kit" on AmiNet and found nothing. Where can I download this software to try and fix my A1010 drive which fell from the desk hard on the ground?

[@CRG]

You can get the latest version from here github.com/keirf/Amiga-Stuff/releases

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

@@CRG oh cool, thank you!

[@hackbuildrestore]

You will never guess what I have lol😊

[@2009numan]

where does the term cylinder come from ?

[@CRG]

Each disk comprises of 80 tracks on the top and bottom of the disk. Unlike say a vinyl record each track is just a circle on the disks surface. A cylinder represents both the top and bottom track at any given position.

[@RetroKrazy]

I'd suspect that someone else damaged the lower head, possibly when the arm broke so they stripped it down to sort it and removed the broken arm :( Shame as if that was the only fault, sure a 3D printed arm could be made.

[@CRG]

Yeah that was the plan, make a 3D printed arm to repair the loading mech but with the head broken as it is, it's just beyond it. I may have another lower head and if that works out I'll pull together a follow up.

[@Google_Is_Evil]

eBay profit is easier when you buy actual untested lots, or lots that are just defective but no serious repair has been attempted. Once you go down to parts or even components, the success rate goes down quite a bit. Buying some collectors loft after they passed away and the estate selling the whole collection is obviously going to give you much more good stuff than the bits that people have left over after they assembled all the working gear and sold that as working.

[@CRG]

My problem with that is if I buy a lot of stuff and find cool things in it then I ultimately want to keep them for my own collection. Hoarder I believe is the common term 😂

[@germanskena6537]

Hola Nico, te consulto. Tengo la necesidad hacer una distro linux pequeña para programar en ZX Spectrum y Commodore 64, con Emuladores como ZEsarUX y Fuse para Linux. Me podrias dar una mano o de donde se podria buscar info para poder hacerlo. Yo tengo una distro hecha con windows xp (con nlite), para poder hacer esto mismo con ZEsarUX, Fuse y ZXSpin, pero el problema es que no se puede COMPARTIR POR TODOS LADOS, POR QUE ES WINDOWS (por copyright), y quisiera armar algo para que sea libre. Armar un linux pequeño que funcione en 32bits, cargue de forma directa alguno de estos emuladores y listo. No necesito mas. El unico problema que puede existir es que los emuladores necesitan debian. A parte de eso, que como te digo, necesitaria que sea para 32bits, para que en PCs viejas se pueda usar sin problemas. Los 2 emuladores no tienen practicamente ninguna exigencia de hardware. Como ultimo comentario, si es para programar en Codigo maquina para z80 o basic para ZX Spectrum 48 o 128k y MOS 6502 Assembler. Es para eso especificamente, pero la distro es para no usar hardware viejo.

[@Mind-your-own-beeswax]

I recently binned one of these drives as the ribbon cables were ripped off. Wouldn’t care but it was sat there for months.

[@CRG]

With the ribbons ripped off it is more or less bin fodder.