Tips for Calibrating/Cleaning a 5.25'' drive?

[comradesean]

I'm starting to get significant errors on side 2 near the later tracks on every dump I'm making and I'm not sure if it's the drive or the disks. My knowledge of cleaning ends with blowing it clean and rubbing a q-tip covered in rubbing alcohol on the heads. Does anyone have any tips & tricks to make sure my drive is in great shape?

[jimmsta]

Try to find a service manual for your drive. There's a chance that you'll be able to find one, if it was a common-ish model. I recently found a Panasonic 5.25" drive, which I intend on getting a kryoflux for, and was able to quickly find the appropriate service manual. The only huge issue is that a lot of the time, to tune these drives, you need access to an oscilloscope, which is typically not something readily available if you're not an electrical engineer (which I'm not, but I work with a bunch of EE's that happen to have said equipment). There could be something wrong with the signal to noise ratio, which again, requires the right equipment to resolve/tune.

[vicvan]

I'm always clearinig/calibrating 5.25" drive with head clearer disk on DOS by using IMD 1.18.
I recommend to do this on real DOS. (No recommend on Windows.)

[comradesean]

So I literally swiped it over a second time with a cotton swab+rubbing alcohol and the thing starting producing some wonderful results for 6 disks and then it sputtered out; producing only unknown data on the second side. -_-

It turned out to be some japanese oem model anyway so I'm thinking I'm just going to try and find a good replacement.


It was a weird disk though. Retail copy of Sim City I bought on eBay that apparently was 90% modified for some reason.