Back to the troublesome NEC FD1157C floppy drive! Cleaning it hasn’t exactly delivered a miraculous recovery, so I’m having another look at why this old 1.2 MB drive is having so much trouble reading disks.

This time I’ve discovered something rather interesting. Applying a little pressure to the drive head actually allows it to read! As soon as things aren’t quite right mechanically, we’re back to errors again. It’s hardly a practical way to operate a floppy drive, but at least it gives us something to investigate.

One viewer later suggested in the YouTube comments that the additional pressure might be slowing the rotation of the disk slightly, which could explain why the drive suddenly manages to read it. That’s certainly an interesting possibility! I haven’t confirmed whether that’s what’s happening, though. There could still be problems with the head contact, alignment or other parts of the mechanism.

So the mystery continues. We’ve got a floppy drive that sometimes reads successfully when a little pressure is applied, but that’s not exactly a proper repair. And after the questionable state of the drive when I received it, perhaps it’s hardly surprising that a quick cleaning wasn’t enough to bring it back to life!

More tinkering required, I think. These old drives certainly know how to keep me entertained!