Commodore-64 Disk Drive Question.

[Aswald]

For the technically skilled...

I have several Commodore-64 disk drives. None of them work. I keep getting a FILE NOT FOUND error message. I tried some of the tips at a website, which did not involve taking it apart, but, no luck.

Any ideas, and how I can go about fixing them?

Thanks!

[SoulBlazer]

Forgive me for asking the simple questions first --

Can you get the drive working on someone else's C-64? Are you sure the disks are fine? Made sure you have everything connected up? Which kind of drive is it?

[Aswald]

It's not the Commodore 64 itself (I've tried them on another), and it cannot be ALL of those disks. The only thing I am sure of is that it's the drives.

One of the drives is that small, fast, white one. The others are the single drive, standard type, by Commodore itself.

[Ze_ro]

The drives are probably out of alignment... seems to be a common problem with those drives. There are programs you can get that will test the alignment of the drive (although how you'll actually run them without a working drive is a question best left to the philosophers). To do this, you'll need to actually open up the drive and fiddle with an adjustment screw. If you do a search for "1541 alignment", you'll probably get some better information than I could provide.

Have you tried formatting a disk and reading/writing it with the "broken" drives? If a drive is out of alignment, it will fail with disks written by another drive, but will work perfectly fine with disks that it's written itself.

--Zero

[Blendo75]

After I started buying C-64 disks at flea markets and such my Commodore disk drive went downhill quickly. It eventually refused to load anything at all. I opened it up and found that the drive head was filthy, literally covered with black dirt. The head looks like a white plastic bubble with little black lines on it.
I cleaned it with a q-tiip and some... Simple Green I think? Cant remember. Probably shouldnt use alcohol. Anyway it worked like a champ after that.
I had to leave it open though so I could test the rest of my flea market finds, I would have to keep periodically cleaning it.

[NeoVenom]

Maybe you are doing the wrong commandz. Or maybe you disk drive isn't working probably. I haven't played my C64 for a while and my floppys still work.

[Flack]

Either the floppies are bad, the drive is dirty, or the drive is out of alignment.

If it's all your disks, it's most likely not the floppies. Here's a good site to put you on the right track.

http://www.gis.net/~sunfish/tcr/cbm/1541.html

[JLukas]

This link may help, too:

http://personalpages.tds.net/~rcarlsen/cbm.html

[Mayhem]

Get some clean disks... old ones can deposit dirt into the drives and mess them about. Open the drives up and give the read heads a clean with a q-tip and some isopropyl alcohol. Plus as said try formatting a disk with the drive once you've done this, that nearly always puts them back in the correct position.