Microdrive issues -

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Andrew
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Joined: Tue Jul 17, 2018 9:10 pm

Microdrive issues -

Post by Andrew »

Yesterday I refelted some microdrives using the felts already glued on springs , repurposed from some non-functioning (but refelted) Microdrive cassettes. More clearly - I extracted the sprin with the old felt and replaced it with a spring with a new felt.
After the operation I saw that Mdv1_ does not work properly: the LED is not flashing and it doesn't load anything from the microdrives, even if for some dir commands works on mdv1_, albeit very very slow. This is very strange as 1 week ago it could read some of the old microdrives, with the old felts and the LED was working - well, in fact it read and loaded Quill - but in the process the felt was completely destroyed. But would not read and load the same Quill microdrive with new felt.
Even if it still reads the directory of some microdrives, when trying to load then if shows the message "bad or changed medium" (or something like this) The message appears after 1-3 minutes in which you can hear the Microdrive working.
Some of the microdrives work in mdv2_, so I do not believe that I did something wrong when refelting them, but I cannot rule that out.
Do you have any idea what could be the cause ? Dirty head ? The springs that hold the felt might not be positioned correctly and are slowing the tape ?
The LED not working on mdv1_ might be just a faulty LED - but can it be the symptom of some other hardware fault ?


RWAP
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Re: Microdrive issues -

Post by RWAP »

Similar thread appears at viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2481&p=23874

General hints on maintenance - https://www.qlforum.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=48&p=144 (this needs ot be moved to FAQs)

The LED is probably that one of those 6 LED wires has come out of the socket on the motherboard - they are always tricky to get them to stay in....


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