exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hi all,

after successful repair of an Epson SMD 480 drive (thx to Dog's great tutorial here in the forum!) I had a look at my failing Atari/Chinon D357 drive (it's the drive, not the floppy controler - exchanging the D357 with any generic drive works, if you ignore the non-fitting face plate).

When googling I found some (external) forum posts that describe issues with this drive on Amiga's or MSX machines (and often the track 0 error that seems to plag my drive too), but no diagnosis or successful repair.

Does anyone here have experience with this drive and some repair tips?

All my Chinon drives have failed with one fault, the glue holding the upper read head goes crispy and the head falls off the arm, either fully or partially, and that’s the end of the drive as you can’t re-fit it accurately enough.

stephen_usher wrote: 18 Apr 2021 06:55 All my Chinon drives have failed with one fault, the glue holding the upper read head goes crispy and the head falls off the arm, either fully or partially, and that’s the end of the drive as you can’t re-fit it accurately enough.

Head is still attached, but I can't rule out that it moved - and it would explain why single sided (format) operation doesn't work either...