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Indus GT Drive Issues


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Hello all retro Atari users,

 

I haven't used my Atari for around a year now. I hooked everything up yesterday, and the Atari 800XL still works fine.

 

However I am having severe issues with the disk drive.

 

I was able to load one of my homemade Basic programs and some songs that I had composed. However, any further attempts to load any games, Dos, or reload the Basic program have failed. I get g4 and g5 errors on the drive on ANY disc that I am trying to load. I do not know much about drive maintenance (my young age relative to 8-bit computers may be involved). I do not know if I should try cleaning the head or if I need to put some kind of grease in the rails where the head moves.

 

I know that the information on the disks is still intact (for the most part anyway), because I was able to load several things on my floppy disk, and later it would try to load and after a few beeps would give the error "blurp". After repeated attempts, it won't correctly load anything anymore, so that's why I think it's a drive maintenance issue.

 

All help is greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks,

James

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hi,

in general, it is worth cleaning the heads with isopropyl alcohol and also check the head rails are nice and free - light oil if required.

my indus used to do intermittent G5 errors and it turned out to be the socket for the ROM chip. i pulled the chip and the socket pins were 'aged' a dark dull grey so i fitted a new socket and all is well. its good practice to reseat all the chips tho

hope this helps!

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To me it seems like the first disk that loaded has flaked off some of its oxide and clogged the head.

 

It would be a good idea to get a supply of alcohol & cotton swabs and some fresh disks.

 

Procedure:

 

1: Clean head.

2: Read source disk into Copymate.

3: Clean head.

4: Write new disk.

5: Repeat for next disk (starting at step 2)

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