I've confirmed that the 5.25" floppy drive I have is dead. · 7:13pm Nov 18th, 2018
The main issue seems to be that the motor is no longer strong enough to spin the disk, and as a result, the drive head cannot read any data beyond what is directly below it. I can get it to spin up if I press gently on it, but it results in a general failure being thrown in both FreeDOS and MS-DOS, so I have a feeling that there's more than just the drive motors having an issue.
RIP.
Usually these drives have rubber belts that have gone bad from age, which can look like a bad motor until you open it up for inspection.
4973557
The motor itself is good, and after disassembling the drive to see what was wrong, I found no belts.
4973575
It's not every day you find yourself needing to get something off a 5.25" floppy. I wonder if my Commodore 1541 could do the job, if you made some kind of a serial converter.
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'Dunno. I'm personally trying to archive some software I found at the thrift store. I already searched several archive databases and the particular version I have had never been archived.
Plus, it'd be useful in the long run considering how I often work with old PCs.
If I remember correctly commodore drives encode data differently than pc compatible drives, so a simple serial converter wouldn't work.