🚀 go-pugleaf

Date:    30 October 88, 13:49:14 EST
From:    Jim McCabe                                     MCCABE   at MTUS5
To:      INFO-ATARI16 at SCORE.STANFORD.EDU
Subject: Dead disk drive (sigh)

Just a few minutes ago my only floppy drive died, or so it seems.
For the two years that I've owned it, every so often it would fail
to "grab" onto the disk properly.  (Meaning that it would spin the
disk for a few seconds, and THEN make the characteristic sucking
sound that normally occurrs instantly.)  I have always assumed that
it was the individual disk's fault, but now it seems like it's been
the drive's fault all along.

Today, I booted up with Flash, and then tried to access the disk
so I could read in a macro file.  I had put in the wrong disk
by accident, so I put my Flash disk back in after it responded with
a "file not found" message.  The next time I tried it, the drive
started to spin, and it never made that familiar sucking sound
that usually happens when everything goes okay.  Instead, the
spinning just sort of winded down and got slower, and the drive
kept trying to read the disk (with no success).

After trying to reboot, with different disks, my drive still just
makes that spinning sound, the light never goes off, and the
ST says that the drive is not responding.

Since the drive is two years old, I wasn't worried about voiding
my warranty and I opened it up.  No luck -- the drive parts are
very hard to see, and I didn't want to break anything by tugging
obstacles out of the way.

So, now the cover is back on, the drive is dead, and I'm hoping someone
out there has had some experience with this before.  I'm assuming
that this is being caused by the drive itself, and not the ST's
controller circuitry, but maybe it's only wishful thinking.

Since I live in Houghton, Michigan, there's nowhere local that I
could take the drive for repair.  Is there somewhere I could send
the drive and have it fixed within a month?  Is there some kind of
deal like the motherboard-swap done at Atari for disk drives?



                                                Jim