A look at the Commodore 1541 floppy disc drive
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Uploader Comments (DrCassette)
All Comments (14)
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Searching for a file that doesnt exists makes the LED flash - load the directory of the disk using load "$",8 then list it and try loading an existing file. If that doesnt work try the alignment test as the head would knock itself silly during a format procedure on these original drives. Wasnt a problem on later models. Have Fun!
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:-) Yes, you normally can diagnose a misaligned head by formatting a disk and reading it back again
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you use load "$",8 to load the disk's directory. then you can load a program from there.
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i never understood why they were so shit at best.
about as fast as tape, disc loading on a commodore
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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!
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Drive head may be out of alignment, which is actually a fairly common problem with these older 1541 drives.
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I somehow remember hearing about how those things would go out of alignment. I could be wrong about that...
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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
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