And just a little thing. Calibration of the unit changes because the overheating. Carry the calibration after 1 hour of turned on. After 2 o3 hours of turned on, the drive is pretty hot. Heat makes not only fail the mecha, but also the roms begin to suffer and random errors occurr.
The heat, the reading errors and head bumping to re-locate zero track is the way to a missalligned 1541. The 1571 is better, but talking about RECORDING, the 1541 is strong and copes with floppys that the 1571 can't.
format a floppy. Drive alingment is no very complex. There's an alligment program (I dont remember the name) that I put on a tape. It allows you tu put the head on track and between tracks. Of course, between tracks, the signal most be near to zero and over track maximun.
Signal comes from a pin of an IC and you need and scope to see wha'ts going.
Check inner, middle and outer tracks. Tre program then perform track by track check. Use some good floppy like the 1541 demo.
Try to forzing a position reset, bump till zero track. This also es acomplished automatically when formatting a floppy. Keep in mind, There are two motor steps between tracks. So, pretty common that head position between tracks and not on the track itself. That occurs because de poor error handling in the 1541 that throws the head in a lost track very often.
Since drive parks head in the midle, and no against zero track, head repositioning not occur very often, unless you force it or
Searching for a file that doesnt exists makes the LED flash - load the directory of the disk using load "$",8 then list it and try loading an existing file. If that doesnt work try the alignment test as the head would knock itself silly during a format procedure on these original drives. Wasnt a problem on later models. Have Fun!
@mynameisleeyesitis I have an idea why that might have been the case. These disk drives were actually created for the Vic 20. A computer that had only 3.5k of ram and therefor ran much smaller programs. When the 64 got bigger and more complex games this made the 1541 seem much slower. Its a reliable drive but its slow as hell.
That LED leads me to believe you have the common problem of drive misalignment. It's a relatively easy problem to fix, requiring just a screwdriver and a jumper wire to ground the board. There are numerous guides online to fix this problem! Happy computing!
It could be a dirty head. Old disk tend to shed their magnetic coating, which gunks up the head and makes the drive not work correctly.
The 1541 drive is actually its own computer; the C64 just gives it commands to do things, and then the drive takes care of all the processing. The 1541 is also nicknamed the "toaster" due to the large amount of heat its power supply produces!
When the LED flashes like that it means there's been an error, so either you've typed something incorrectly, or the disk drive can't find the file you want, CoolDudeClem's suggestion is worth trying, tht's generally how you load programs off those disks. Believe it or not, the Disk Operating System is contained within the disk drive itself, not on the disks or in the computer, so the DOS doesn't take up any RAM when loading programs, at least that's what I understand.
Have you tried typing in load"*",8,1? In most cases that will automatically boot the disk without you having to know what file to type in, you may have to type in run afterwards. The 1451 drive does have it's own cpu so there are quite a few things that can go wrong. If you get a tape drive for it and sme tapes, that should work, but tapes are not very reliable and can take anywhere up to 5 minutes to load.
And just a little thing. Calibration of the unit changes because the overheating. Carry the calibration after 1 hour of turned on. After 2 o3 hours of turned on, the drive is pretty hot. Heat makes not only fail the mecha, but also the roms begin to suffer and random errors occurr.
The heat, the reading errors and head bumping to re-locate zero track is the way to a missalligned 1541. The 1571 is better, but talking about RECORDING, the 1541 is strong and copes with floppys that the 1571 can't.
38911bytefree 1 day ago
format a floppy. Drive alingment is no very complex. There's an alligment program (I dont remember the name) that I put on a tape. It allows you tu put the head on track and between tracks. Of course, between tracks, the signal most be near to zero and over track maximun.
Signal comes from a pin of an IC and you need and scope to see wha'ts going.
Check inner, middle and outer tracks. Tre program then perform track by track check. Use some good floppy like the 1541 demo.
38911bytefree 1 day ago
Try to forzing a position reset, bump till zero track. This also es acomplished automatically when formatting a floppy. Keep in mind, There are two motor steps between tracks. So, pretty common that head position between tracks and not on the track itself. That occurs because de poor error handling in the 1541 that throws the head in a lost track very often.
Since drive parks head in the midle, and no against zero track, head repositioning not occur very often, unless you force it or
38911bytefree 1 day ago
Searching for a file that doesnt exists makes the LED flash - load the directory of the disk using load "$",8 then list it and try loading an existing file. If that doesnt work try the alignment test as the head would knock itself silly during a format procedure on these original drives. Wasnt a problem on later models. Have Fun!
jecripe1 1 month ago
:-) Yes, you normally can diagnose a misaligned head by formatting a disk and reading it back again
Simcore999 2 months ago
you use load "$",8 to load the disk's directory. then you can load a program from there.
kevtris 3 months ago
i never understood why they were so shit at best.
about as fast as tape, disc loading on a commodore
mynameisleeyesitis 1 year ago
@mynameisleeyesitis I have an idea why that might have been the case. These disk drives were actually created for the Vic 20. A computer that had only 3.5k of ram and therefor ran much smaller programs. When the 64 got bigger and more complex games this made the 1541 seem much slower. Its a reliable drive but its slow as hell.
summer20105707 2 days ago
Hello DrCassette,
That LED leads me to believe you have the common problem of drive misalignment. It's a relatively easy problem to fix, requiring just a screwdriver and a jumper wire to ground the board. There are numerous guides online to fix this problem! Happy computing!
nintendork121 1 year ago
Drive head may be out of alignment, which is actually a fairly common problem with these older 1541 drives.
Watcher3223 1 year ago
I somehow remember hearing about how those things would go out of alignment. I could be wrong about that...
batterymaker 1 year ago
It could be a dirty head. Old disk tend to shed their magnetic coating, which gunks up the head and makes the drive not work correctly.
The 1541 drive is actually its own computer; the C64 just gives it commands to do things, and then the drive takes care of all the processing. The 1541 is also nicknamed the "toaster" due to the large amount of heat its power supply produces!
vwestlife 1 year ago
@vwestlife
I cleaned the head, but it didn't seemed to be dirty.
DrCassette 1 year ago
When the LED flashes like that it means there's been an error, so either you've typed something incorrectly, or the disk drive can't find the file you want, CoolDudeClem's suggestion is worth trying, tht's generally how you load programs off those disks. Believe it or not, the Disk Operating System is contained within the disk drive itself, not on the disks or in the computer, so the DOS doesn't take up any RAM when loading programs, at least that's what I understand.
Lachlant1984 1 year ago
nice c64 you got from the dump
adamxp12 1 year ago
Have you tried typing in load"*",8,1? In most cases that will automatically boot the disk without you having to know what file to type in, you may have to type in run afterwards. The 1451 drive does have it's own cpu so there are quite a few things that can go wrong. If you get a tape drive for it and sme tapes, that should work, but tapes are not very reliable and can take anywhere up to 5 minutes to load.
CoolDudeClem 1 year ago
@CoolDudeClem
Thank you for the advice, I'm going to try that!
DrCassette 1 year ago
You may look at Ray Carlsens commodore page, that helped me a lot with my commodore stuff.
Wondermike42 1 year ago