Atari ST SF354 Floppy Drive Repairs 

hey man can you make a Windows XP build video for the Windows XP 20th anniversary coming at October 25

Plays "Today is a Good Day"

Just looked at my feed and saw all 3. This is a good day :)

+This Does Not Compute

Check out Cathode Ray Dude, he just made a W-VHS video ...

was about to type this :-)

Yes this was the same in the ST, if you did have two drives they were A/B if you had one dragging files to B from A: invokes the disk swapping routines in the ROM

Can confirm, I've still got my 520STFM. When I had a working external floppy drive it would automatically map it to drive B.

You mean Digital Research, not Intergalactic. Right?

@@brecken19972 Sure. It was Intergalactic Digital Research before it was just Digital Research though. But yeah this was probably in that era.

And to be fair it’s absolutely awful 😂

@@leeshepherd6512 I loved it :) Wasn't all too bad. It had some nice things going for it, like the ability to run utility apps "in the background", like calculator or a contact book etc... Though as a kid that was mostly used for the googly eyes program. Never used it on color monitors though, only strictly high density monochrome, which made the whole thing look much better.

@@leeshepherd6512 Depends what's on your mind. Low- and med- res doesn't look too good (at least not in stock incarnation), yet if your programs adhered to GEM's API, they would run on TT or Falcon, or a machine with one of video cards people managed to connect via VME bus. It also had a thing similar to modern HAL (VDI), so it could use drivers to support not only new video cards, but also some non-standard imaging hardware. There was even a VDI replacement you could install for much faster performance and better looks (NVDI). You could have all this stuff supported (and more, like multitasking variants of TOS) without touching your program's code.

Agreed. Probably not seen much use, or was in use in a very clean environment. I'm leaning towards the latter since this ST is not an F model

And it uses standard shugart and power connectors which directly could be hooked up to a Gotek. This is impossible with my SF314 double-sided drive, which uses propreatary connectors which couldn't be connected to anything but this specific drive! Atari released a whole bunch of different PCBs and drives back then. 🙄

Yes, it was the first (single sided) drive, which came out initially with the early ST models like this 520. I think the SF314 (double sided, no belt) came out a few months later, maybe early 1986.

Does sound like opening it up and cleaning it would be the first step. However, honestly it's hardly worth even getting them fixed since it's only a matter of time that the floppies themselves would die. Long term, might just be worth swapping the drive out for a Gotek.

I’ve run into a few now. E.g.: Early ones, like the IBM PC Tandon 5.25” drives. The internal 3.5” on the Toshiba T4xx0 laptops.

@@nickwallette6201 Yeah must be those single-sided units. My first 3.5" floppy drive was the Commodore 1581.

I've bought a second hand ST in 1989 which had this drive. I remember repairing it several times until I bought a double sided unofficial drive for it. Finally I could read the other side of ST Format disks

That's probably because the Shugart interface always exposes 2 drives on 1 cable, and the system has no way of being aware that only 1 drive is connected.

@@Stoney3K No. TOS is well aware that there is only one drive. If you drop a file onto drive B icon it will prompt you to put the other disk into drive A.

@@Shifter-1040ST Itis only aware of such a fact if the OS actually tries to access it (which it can't) and then prompt you for the other drive. That's also why you could select the "Floppy Seek at Startup" option on older BIOSes, and you could set drive B to be anything even though it is not physically there. The Shugart interface is pretty dumb, the only way of selecting the "B" drive is by putting signals on the appropriate pins and hoping that something happens. There is no difference in signals between not having a disk in the drive and the drive not being there at all.

@@Stoney3K I see. The OS has to actively seek the drive to see if it's there. But my point was, that the B icon is always there for good reason: to allow file operations between disks even with a single drive.

The square holes in the plastic were just too small for me to get my normal screw drivers through. So I had to rummage for one that would fit and that was the first one I grabbed. Inset screws are always so annoying.

Insertion failed...

Gotek installed in SF354 case is able to read just single sided floppy images so that would not be a solution to your problem.

It's actually brilliant! A counter example to this is the TRS-80 Model 1 where the power, tape, and monitor connections are identical 5 pin DIN connectors on the back right next to eachother. If you connect a live power supply to the wrong connector on that computer you can damage the machine. So having incompatible connectors for power and data like this is a really simple safety measure.

@@TechTangents That's a fair point - but it still feels wrong to me!

Makes sense that they'd go with non-standard cables. The whole drive is over engineered.