[Help] Drive Issues
#1
Hi.

I have purchased two Panasonic JU-475-5 AKO drives one last year and a replacement this past May.

I am using the SCP & drive to archive my C64 original disk collection. I do it in my spare time so its not like I spend weeks/months at a time doing this. Both of the drives saw little use.

The issue I'm having is such. The first drive that I bought sometime last year or so worked great for a while then stopped working. No matter what I tried, the drive only makes empty 664 BLOCKS FREE G64 images. Even if I try making a .scp flux image first.

So, I purchased another drive this past May and finally got to use it the last few days. The first 20 disks from my boxed game collection copied effortlessly. That's 20 for 20. I was amazed at how well these diskettes keep their data over such a long time. I then began copying my loose original disks that are in my disk box on my desk. I first load the disks on my real C64 and 1571 drive to make sure they are good and load fine. After that I bring the disk over to my SCP setup. At first everything was working fine. Then after a total of maybe 35-40 disks that I archived (including the 20 boxed disks) this NEW replacement drive is doing the exact same thing. No matter what settings I try, the issue persists. I even pulled out some of the disks that archived successfully earlier in the day and they too are leaving just empty g64 files.

Now, I have tried unplugging the SCP from the PC, the drive from the SCP, and even rebooting my PC, then plugging the SCP USB back in to the PC. Still I received the same result. I also cleaned the heads after every 2 or 3 disks. First I used a 5.25" disk cleaner kit. No fix. I then tried manually cleaning the head and still no fix. Remember this is now the second drive with almost the exact same amount of use (aka not much. Not like I've been using it for months or years making backups, etc). I can't believe 2 separate drives would have the same issue after almost the exact same amount of use.

Does anyone here possibly know what else might cause such an issue? Of course it is possible (slim I'd reckon) that both just coincidentally died the same exact way, but that seems a little too coincidental. I'm hoping there may be some other reason this might be happening.

Any help is appreciated.
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#2
You need to be cleaning the heads just about every single disk that you dump.  The oxide comes off the disk surface and friction fuses particles to the heads, making reads virtually unusable.  You will to find a fiber type disk cleaner that you insert into the disk drive and use the SuperCard Pro's Utility menu to turn on the motor and step the heads.  You will need to use 91% or higher grade alcohol with the cleaner disk.  Anything lower has too much water content and can cause rusting if spilled anywhere in the drive (or on disks).

You can always send me a disk image of something that won't work.  I can look at the flux data to see if there is a disk or drive issue.
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#3
I just ran it through the SCP utility menu 3 times with my disk cleaning kit "Allsop". I also cleaned it manually with a q-tip but the drive is still only making blank g64 images. The drive head looks clean as there is no visible discoloration or signs of dirt. Perhaps the head died or the drive itself. It appears to operate normally but simply doesn't read data. Sad

I wish I had an old PC to put it into and test to see if it could read PC disks.
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#4
Make sure that you don't have the density set incorrectly. Look at the pull-down menu. The density should be set to LOW, unless you have some good reason to change it.

Send me a dump of a front side of a disk.
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