HP Forum Archive 14

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connector of old Floppy drive Message #1 Posted by Andre Koppel on 15 Aug 2004, 5:48 a.m. Hi all, two of my old sony floopy disk drives of type OA-D32W-11 are gone (upper head is broken). I think it should be possible to replace them with some kind of newer drives. But the problem is to get a description of the connector pins because they use a connector with 26 Pins. The following models only use 20 pins. The six additional pins are completely mass. If think if the correct wiring could be found, it should be possible to replace the old broken drives with some newer driver. Has anyone some kind of information about the motherboard to floppy connector? By the one. I have found the information that the MAC Plus uses the same floppy drive. I have purchased such an old MAC Plus at EBay, but it's not the same drive :-(

Re: connector of old Floppy drive Message #2 Posted by Eric Smith on 15 Aug 2004, 4:15 p.m., in response to message #1 by Andre Koppel If that's a drive out of a 9114 (or most other HP drives of that vintage, such as 9122), it's a special 600 RPM drive, and the only source of replacements is other HP drives. They're not compatible with PCs, Macintoshes, or much of anything.

Re: connector of old Floppy drive Message #3 Posted by Tony Duell on 16 Aug 2004, 1:52 p.m., in response to message #1 by Andre Koppel I think you've mis-interpretted one of my messages. The Mac+ floppy drive is not the same (or compatible) with the drive in any HP disk drive unit to my knowledge. But some of the parts of the drive in the 9114B (and 9153) are believed to be the same as the parts in the Mac+ drive -- the head assembly, stepper motor, motor drive chips, analogue ASIC chip, etc. Your drive sounds like the one from a 9114A (or 9133, 9122, etc). AFAIK none of the parts of that drive are used in any Mac. These drives have an interface which is similar to a PC drive interface (and totally different to a Mac drive interface), but they rotate at 600 rpm (PC 3.5" drives rotate at 300 rpm). You therefore can't use a PC drive. Damage to the upper head is common on these units, alas. The grease on the eject mechanism goes hard/sticky, and the disk holder doesn't latch up properly. The head then catches on the disk when you try to eject it. The only cure is to replace the head carriage and strip, clean and re-lubricate the eject mechanism. Even if you replace the entire drive, I would advise doing the latter unless _you know it's been done recently_. Otherwise you might wreck the new drive's head too. Incidentally, I've swapped head assemblies on these drives, and found the alignment to be pretty close (checked with a catseye disk). You may not need to do the alignment.

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