Date   : Sun, 22 Mar 2009 17:27:43 -0500
From   : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Cleaning 5 1/4" drives

MarkWoobster@... wrote:
> Any way to clean a 5 1/4" disc drive? in a way similar to a cleaning  
> cassette for tape players or a cd cleaner for cd/dvd drives?

I usually use a cotton bud soaked in a bit of isopropanol - pull any metal 
screening off the drive and you should be able to get at the heads and lift 
them apart slightly. Then *gently* wipe across the heads with the cotton bud a 
few times, rotating it slightly as you go.

The purer the isopropanol you can get, the better - but I've found that in 
practice if you're reading disks with high contamination then the drive will 
need cleaning every few disks no matter what (Boots likely sell 95% or 97% 
rubbing alcohol that'll do the job).

If you've got seriously bad disks and are just interested in reading them, 
taking the actual disc portion out of the jacket, washing in warm water, 
drying and temporarily housing in a donor jacket can work wonders - then just 
toss the disc once you have the data off.

I steer clear of 5.25" Parrot and Wabash disks if at all possible - I've seen 
far more failures on them than anything else (in the sense that the binder 
holding the magnetic coating to the substrate's gone bad, rather than them 
just having a high error count - in one case it ripped the heads clean out of 
the drive when everything fouled up)

> I have just repaired my old BBC B but i'm having a lot of problems getting  
> any discs to read. *cat shows the contents but most of the programs wont work, 
> i  get disc errors.

Definitely not a media / drive mismatch?

The other problem is that a lot of beebs are ex-schools and the drives have 
often suffered a lot of abuse - to the point that the alignment on them isn't 
so good...

cheers

Jules