Starting point

This is a common Chinon FB-354 (Rev E) floppy drive for an Amiga 500. It does not look too bad, but unfortunately it is described as "non-working". Refurbishing, including repairing, Amiga floppy drives are not always a success. But, I will do my best to make this a working drive again! And who knows, even if it turns out that this drive is beyond repair I might learn something on the way.

From the outside there is only a little bit of dust and grease. And there are no signs of damage. So even if this drive is described as "non-working" there are no obvious exterior signs of issues preventing it from working. What is very nice is that there is a date code on the top metal chassis saying "01/90". So I think we can assume that this drive was manufactured at the same time as the Amiga it was originally installed in.

Refurbishment plan

To refurbish this internal disk drive the plan is to do this trough the following actions (some of them in parallell and different order):

- Clean the interior
- Clean special parts such as R/W head and stepper motor shaft
- If required: replace electrolytic capacitors
- Verify operation by testing

Disassembly

To remove the top cover the three screws are removed first. There is a (very) small screw at the top rear side, and the one on each side of the drive.

With the screws out of the way the internal drive is removed from the chassis by carefully pulling from the front/pushing from the back.

Internal drive

Visual inspection

There are no obvious visual indications why this drive should work. That said, it is impossible to actually see a slightly misaligned drive just from visual inspection. There are some old grease on the stepper motor shaft, but I don´t think it is very severe. Also, there are some dust and dirt in the drive, but the R/W heads doesn´t look to bad either.

There are three old electrolytic capacitors. They are not bulging, or leaking, in any way, but they are old and could be out of specification.

Below are some pictures of the drive before refurbish.

Initial testing

The drive is installed in a the original Amiga 500. To do the initial test the Amiga Test Disk is used. Below is a table showing the results from the initial testing.

Banner picture credits: Medvedev