Thread: Cleaning and Maintenance

No single component fails more often than the floppy drive. This is not really that surprising because floppy drives have more exposure to the outside environment than anything but the keyboard. Floppy drives are also exposed to the threat of mechanical damage. Many people destroy floppy drives by accidentally inserting inverted disks, paper clips. In the case of this abuse, the key preventive maintenance performed on floppy drives is cleaning. As anyone who has ever tried to do a thorough job of cleaning an old PC might have that noticed the floppy drive is an important path by which airborne dust is sucked into a computer. If you remove the cover of a floppy drive from an old computer you will often find a lot of dirt in there. A drive that has not been used for a long time is likely to give errors unless it is cleaned. You can find floppy drive cleaning kits.

Floppy drive cleaning kits that consist of a cloth disk that can be wetted with a cleaning fluid are well worth the cost. Using one of these kits on a floppy disk drive that has not been used much recently is often helpful. This can also save your disks from dirt that causes errors in reading and writing; and also scratches the coating on a disk, resulting in permanent errors.



The most important part of cleaning the drive is cleaning the read/write heads, which over time will tend to accumulate dirt and residue from disk media. Figure FD- 7 shows floppy cleaning kit. Drop a couple of droplets on the head of the cleaning floppy and insert it into the floppy disk. The cleaning agent cleans the dirt on the surface of read/write heads present in the floppy drive.

In addition, the inside of the floppy disk drive should also be cleaned of dust, since it can make way for the dirt to accumulate on other components as well. This is best done the same way as other components would be cleaned, using either a vacuum or compressed air. You can do the cleaning right through the drive slot; you don't have to open up the drive. One maintenance activity that used to be part of the routine for floppy disks was to check and adjust their alignment. If the alignment of a drive drifts from what it should be, it will lose the ability to read disks written by other drives, and similarly the other drives will be unable to read those disks that it writes.