Adam disk drive issues

[rapoza609]

So recently I fired up my 3 Adam Disk drives. 2 powered on but I could hear they weren't reading the disks. The third, the one I have in the original box, worked perfectly and I was able to boot up all kinds of games I had on floppys...as backups of course...

 

Anyway, does anyone know if it is possible to fix the disk drives or once they get to this point, are they just dead? If they're dead, are they still worth anything or are they just big paperweights?

[adamcon]

So recently I fired up my 3 Adam Disk drives. 2 powered on but I could hear they weren't reading the disks. The third, the one I have in the original box, worked perfectly and I was able to boot up all kinds of games I had on floppys...as backups of course...

 

Anyway, does anyone know if it is possible to fix the disk drives or once they get to this point, are they just dead? If they're dead, are they still worth anything or are they just big paperweights?

That's a BUMMER. First thing to do is to find a 5 1/4" cleaner disk along with a little denatured alcohol to pur on it. IF they worked before, they are probably dirty and need that cleaning. NEVER throw out a data drive or disk drive, they may be fixable in the future.

[Geoff Oltmans]

The floppy drives are fairly ordinary pieces/parts... there's nothing special apart from the drive mechanism itself which can be replaced if need be. One of my drives is kind of flakey until it's been powered on for about 5 minutes and then all is normal. Have you tried waiting a little bit?

 

I presume the problem on my drive is due to some weak caps in the power supply (the big ones near the connectors on the back). I've been meaning to swap them out and see if that fixes the issue.

[adamcon]

The floppy drives are fairly ordinary pieces/parts... there's nothing special apart from the drive mechanism itself which can be replaced if need be. One of my drives is kind of flakey until it's been powered on for about 5 minutes and then all is normal. Have you tried waiting a little bit?

 

I presume the problem on my drive is due to some weak caps in the power supply (the big ones near the connectors on the back). I've been meaning to swap them out and see if that fixes the issue.

Geoff, I have 2 that take a warm up time also, and 1 that only wnats to work cold - once it warms up it gets flaky. May be caps or if I remember correctly, Dan Elliott adjusted something; possibly the tiny adjustable caps ont he way to the drive mech (??????)

[Geoff Oltmans]

Geoff, I have 2 that take a warm up time also, and 1 that only wnats to work cold - once it warms up it gets flaky. May be caps or if I remember correctly, Dan Elliott adjusted something; possibly the tiny adjustable caps ont he way to the drive mech (??????)

 

There is a write precompensation control on the controller board, and I believe one or two on the mechanism itself. I haven't attempted a repair on the Coleco controller other than replacing with a double sided mechanism. Nowadays it's definitely worth keeping any of the old parts since they are getting rarer and rarer. I keep tinkering with the idea of coming up with my own ROM for so that you wouldn't have to jury rig a disk inserted switch on a replacement mechanism.

 

Ideally we would have a SD->ADAMNet floppy drive emulator. I've seriously thought about pursuing that.