"Fixed" my Canon Cat floppy drive, but Cat doesn't think it's reading/writing

[RDKLINC]

Hello! First off, thanks to @ClassicHasClass for all your work on the Cat!

I have a Cat that is working except (of course) for the drive. The mechanism that holds the drive head and which slides back and forth was stuck and not moving, so I took it out, cleaned/lubed it, and while the plastic mounts holding the rod were intact, the process of taking out the mechanism broke the one parallel to the head, so I got to use your technique and put the metal replacement piece in there, so thanks for the help with that!

Now the mechanism moves back and forth and it SEEMS to be reading and writing when I try disk functions. However, I always get a beep, and the explanation is always that it can’t read/write and it thinks it has a bad disk.

I should say that I have no Cat disks. I am using known-good DSDD Mac disks with random files on them. According to the Cat manual, it should be able to handle these.

My essential question is this: Is it valid to rely on the Cat’s supposed ability to format any given Mac disk, and is it reasonable to diagnose the drive as still non-working because it’s not succeeding with any given Mac disk, or do the disks in fact need to be prepared and formatted a certain way by a different computer before attempting use on the Cat?

For all I know I may have a fully working Cat, and I just don’t have properly prepared disks. Or I may have a bad drive. The head is on a little oval-shaped metal disk, and that disk came un-glued, and I glued it back, which was tricky, because it doesn’t “click” in place and it therefore could easily be off by a micron or two.

If my drive ends up bad, I'm tempted to replace it with a PC drive, but that sounds like yet another rabbit hole.

Anyway thanks so much!

John

 

[ClassicHasClass]

No, they don't need to be prepared in any special way - the Cat will reformat the disk if necessary. It sounds like your drive is indeed busted.

That said, I'm having difficulty visualizing how the drive head looks. Can you post a picture? When you say it doesn't click in place, what are you referring to exactly?

There have been successful replacements with a PC drive, but this will require a conversion circuit. At that point it may be better just to replace it with a Gotek. I've been thinking about that very thing myself.

 

[RDKLINC]

Thanks so much for the reply! That's what I was afraid of! :-(

I've attached a picture. You can see how the head is sitting on top a thin metal rectangular plate. This plate is simply glued on, and when I took out the whole sliding mechanism, the plate came unglued, and it was dangling from its data cable. I removed old glue and glued it together again from the underside. By "click in place" I meant that there are no holes that tabs neatly go into, or indicators of where the plate should be -- it just sits there, so it could easily be an imperceptibly small amount off center, which I'm guessing could make all the difference. I may try to unglue/glue it again, just to see if I randomly get it right the second time, but it's probably a lost cause.

I would go the Gotek route myself, but I'm trying to repair my Cat so I can sell it to a guy who has disks from 30 years ago. I've tried to tell him that connecting a drive to a PC and reading the disks that way is probably the more productive route.

Thanks again!

John

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I'm wondering if it's misaligned, yeah. It looks like it's seated just fractionally further back than mine is. Unfortunately this would be very hard to figure out since I have no idea exactly what properly aligned means for a Cat drive.

This won't help you sell it, but since it's possible to read them with a Greaseweazle now, it absolutely should be possible to extract the text. I might look into writing a tool for that.