A3010 floppy drive problem

Hello,

Sorry if I’ve posted this in the wrong area.

I’ve recently been playing around with my family’s old A3010 from the early 90s, and it still seems to work fine except for the floppy drive, which seems to behave strangely.

It takes several tries to get it to mount floppy disks. The first few tries it gives this error message: “Disk not understood, has it been formatted?” and I have to dismount, and then mount again, or remove the disk and reinsert it a number of times before it eventually does mount the disk. After that it can read and write to the floppy disks without any problems.

I’m guessing that the floppy drive is damaged or something. I’m considering trying to replace it, and so I wanted to ask, do you know if the old Acorn computers used generic floppy drives or if they require some kind of special drive? I recently opened up the computer to remove the clock battery (which was dead, and had apparently started to leak a bit) and at the time the floppy drive seemed to look much like a generic PC floppy disk drive, but I didn’t look at it too closely.

Anyway, has anyone here had a similar problem?

What you might do is to open the case and find the ribbon cable that’s attached to the drive. It might be grey or rainbow coloured. On both ends are connectors, open them and remove the cable. Then plug the connectors in again. There might be some corrosion on the pins. Now try the drive again to see if it is stable.

Also clean the drive heads.
Blow the dust out. There’s probably a fair bit gone in there.
IPA on a thin pad to cut through the accumulation on the actual head.

Thanks guys.
I cleaned as much dust as I could out of the drive using a small brush on a stick, and I’m not sure but it seems like it might have made a difference. Before it was taking several tries before it would read a disk, now it just takes two, and it works on the second try.

Tomorrow I’m going to see if I can clean the drive out more effectively, and unplug/replace the cable and clean the contacts.