Thank you very much. I bought two of these drives at a flea market meet-up (JU-455-7), and I think I just repaired one... No more crashing sound and I formatted the disk successfully. I did use oil on the shaft, but instead of lithium grease on the worm gear, I opted for silicone grease (low viscosity). Now I have a second drive to repair (it has another problem where the wire on the track 0 detect LED is detached), as well as a JU-475-3 (high density version). The reason to have both of these in a computer is because 1.2mb drives are not fully compatible with 360KB floppies (disks written on a 1.2mb will not be readable on a 360KB drive).
They seem to be robust drives. I have only had one I was not able to repair and it was in very bad shape. You are correct about keeping a 360K drive around for writing those floppies. The only exception is that you need a 96TPI drive for C64 floppies in order to handle the half tracks on many disks.
Hey Birt! I LOVE the SuperCard Pro....did you know that I imaged the only known surviving floppy disks for the Convergent Technologies AWS with this device??? It worked perfectly, and that's one of the key reasons we've been able to do restoration work on a nearly "Forgotten Machine", such as this. Thanks for the viedeo!
I had the same drive with the exact same issue and noise yours made. Followed your lead and now my drive works fine. Thanks for the tear down and restoration procedures. My drive wasn't nearly as dirty as yours but a good cleaning (which I didn't think was the problem) brought it back to life.
I'm glad it was helpful. I have found a good cleaning will get most floppy drives back in working order. The older belt driven ones are often more cantankerous tough.
@@HeyBirt My father used to work on those back in the 80's. I remember him using a light to shine on the drive spindle that contained black marks for timing. When in correct time the marks would magically stop moving.
Thanks for the video. Just what I needed for doing some testing and repairing on a stack of drives. Now that I've retired I've been getting back into restoring some of my old S-100 and other CP/M computers put away decades ago. I have been running into old too many floppy drive issues. Just dirty old beast issues and perhaps a few alignment issues. So I just purchased a SCP, dug out an old ATX pwr supply, and have been testing some 5.25" drives for now. Soon as I build an adapter cable and a pwr supply I'll start on some 8" drives. Once I have some tested drives I can work on some controller board issues knowing that it's not a drive causing the problems. Later on a second adapter so I can test 3.5" laptop drives that use a 26 pin ribbon cable. Gives me something to do this upcoming winter and while Covid keeps me inside.
It is one of my favorite purchases. I have been able to image all my old disks and grab images from online to write onto real disks for newly acquired machines.
I acquired a JU-455-5 ... and stumbled down the rabbit hole here. Now, do I dedicate to learning floppy drive repair for 1 single drive? I don't know... but I'm tempted
SuperCard Pro looks great; it's out of stock now but I signed up for availability notifications. I've found ZoomFloppy (and/or OpenCBM, not sure which to blame) fairly frustrating as it deals very poorly with errors on the disks, which happens quite often when archiving a bunch of old floppies. When you do your follow-up video, I'd love to see how it deals with bad disks.
Jim said he should have some more the first part of March. I will cover disk errors for sure. Something else interesting I found what that the JU-475 (1.2M drive) and (JU-455 360K) read some tracks differently. This may be slight differences in alignment or due to the wider head of the 369K drive.
Did you use the 360k drive to image most of the disks or did you also use the 1.2? What about side 2 on disks that don't have a second index hole? KryoFlux can't deal with this at all unless you modify the drive to be able to image both sides at once. Excellent video and looking forward to seeing the 2nd part. I have both a KryoFlux and a SuperCardPro and while I have imaged plenty of disks with KryoFlux I haven't yet done the same for SCP. You can write images back to disk fairly easy with the KF, even though it is mostly command line. Last time I used SCP you could only write back SCP flux images. Maybe this has changed in more recent versions?
I first imaged all my C64 disks with the 1.2M JU-475-4 drive. I then tired some of them that had errors with the JU-455 360K drive and was able to recover more data. This might be due to slight differences in alignment, width of the read head, etc. For C64 disks that use half tracks for copy protection you will need a 96TPI drive (1.2M). The JU-475 1.2M drives have a jumper that tells the drive it can still spin the motor even if it does not see the index signal. In the SCP software you can set it to use the index (for commercial software) or ignore it (for the backside of disks or anything written on a Commodore drive.) There is other software available to transform SCP files to/from other image formats. I'll cover this in the next SCP video.
@@HeyBirt That is cool that you can enable the motor on side 2. I have a Mitsumi D509V5 (That I can tell) and it seems to have only one jumper that I remember. It does work good for imaging and for writing back to disk. This disks work fine on all my Commodore drives most of the time. And that is usually G64s. Some don't work because they were remastered for emulators. I need to find one of those Panasonic drives it looks like.
@@RacerX- Sometimes drives will have wire jumpers soldered on the PCB. It does seem like the Panasonic drives are more configurable. There is a list on the SCP forum of drives that are known to work and a PDF of jumper settings.
Great video Jeff, really enjoyed that. I’m a sucker for any old floppy drive refurbs and it worked great after a good clean. Does the SCP only interface with PC style drives or dies it also interface with a 1541 ? Looks like PC floppy only. I guess the Zoomfloppy would be what I’d need for a 1541
The SCP interfaces with any drive with a standard style (PC) interface. It does have an header on it labeled 'IEC' which was included for possible someday talking on the Commodore IEC serial bus. The 130+ disks I archived were all C64 disks and many of them would not work with the ZoomFloppy/1571 drive combo. If there are any sort of errors it just bombs out. The SCP will try multiple times and compare the data it gets back to try and recover the data. The ZoomFloppy and Commodore drive does have the advantage that you can use it with VICE though. For Archiving I think the SCP is the best tool for the job.
@@HeyBirt- So SCP images of copy protected disks cannot be used directly in Vice, only if rewritten to a physical 1541 disk and connected to the PC via ZoomFloppy (or not even that)?
When imaging a C= disk with the SCP you can choose to save directly to a .D64. You can use the .D64 file in VICE, etc. If you have an SCP file you can convert that to a .D64 using the SCP software (I think) or other conversion software.
Jim @ CBMSTUFF updated the board because a few components were at EOL (end of life, component manufacturers were no longer going to produce them.) He was scheduled to have the new version ready in March but COVID19 got in the way by disrupting the global supply chain. I don't think I have ever seen one offered second hand. Once you get one of them you don't want to ever let it go :) It is far too useful.
The drive latch handle is friction fit onto the shaft (at least I never found a set screw!) If you pull it off, you can remove the front plate without removing the interlock assembly.
The handle is pressed on but in my experience they are so tight on this type of drive you can't budge them. Or, maybe I'm a wimp :) Maybe a gentle heating with a hair dryer would enlarge the handle enough to make it a bit looser?
I've found that only the Teac models of drives allow for the drive latch to come off fairly easy. On my recent Panasonic cleaning (following Birt's lead) I applied what I felt was too much force trying to remove the latch and it didn't budge. The hair dryer idea is good though, may try that if I ever need to tear a non Teac drive down again.
How does Supercard pro compare to the Kryoflux ? It seems that the software and installation is way better on Supercard. Kryoflys is a pain to install drivers for.
I don't have a Kyroflux to compare. Their main purpose of flux level imaging is the same. The SCP is very easy to set up and use. The only 'trick' to installing the software is to right-click on the installer and run as administrator. This is explained well in the manual. The software works well but could be better documented (but that is true for a lot of software.)
@@circuitsandcigars1278 Are you asking what power supply I used for the floppy drive? If so, it is from a USBIDE adapter kit I bought many years ago (ones used to temporarily hook hard drives to PC through USB for imaging.) You can buy these kits now for less than $20. For a 5-1/4" floppy you need 5V and 12V for a 3-1/2" floppy you just need 5V and can use the 5V floppy type connector on the SuperCard Pro (if your USB port can supply at least 500ma)
SCP has propper archival file format. Kryoflux file format is just a dump of information between the hardware and the drive. Each track is stored in a separate file and this quickly becomes unwieldy.
Excellent presentation ... nice to see the floppy drive put back into pristine condition.
Thanks, it is satisfying to see a device come back to life.
Thank you very much. I bought two of these drives at a flea market meet-up (JU-455-7), and I think I just repaired one... No more crashing sound and I formatted the disk successfully.
I did use oil on the shaft, but instead of lithium grease on the worm gear, I opted for silicone grease (low viscosity).
Now I have a second drive to repair (it has another problem where the wire on the track 0 detect LED is detached), as well as a JU-475-3 (high density version).
The reason to have both of these in a computer is because 1.2mb drives are not fully compatible with 360KB floppies (disks written on a 1.2mb will not be readable on a 360KB drive).
They seem to be robust drives. I have only had one I was not able to repair and it was in very bad shape. You are correct about keeping a 360K drive around for writing those floppies. The only exception is that you need a 96TPI drive for C64 floppies in order to handle the half tracks on many disks.
Hey Birt! I LOVE the SuperCard Pro....did you know that I imaged the only known surviving floppy disks for the Convergent Technologies AWS with this device??? It worked perfectly, and that's one of the key reasons we've been able to do restoration work on a nearly "Forgotten Machine", such as this. Thanks for the viedeo!
Awesome. It really is a great device. There are other things like it but it seems to do the best job and has a sensible archival file format.
I had the same drive with the exact same issue and noise yours made. Followed your lead and now my drive works fine. Thanks for the tear down and restoration procedures. My drive wasn't nearly as dirty as yours but a good cleaning (which I didn't think was the problem) brought it back to life.
I'm glad it was helpful. I have found a good cleaning will get most floppy drives back in working order. The older belt driven ones are often more cantankerous tough.
@@HeyBirt My father used to work on those back in the 80's. I remember him using a light to shine on the drive spindle that contained black marks for timing. When in correct time the marks would magically stop moving.
Very satisfying seeing you patiently and diligently clean and rework this little drive back to health.
Great job =D Nice to see that drive working so well after you gave it a good service =D
Thanks for the video. Just what I needed for doing some testing and repairing on a stack of drives. Now that I've retired I've been getting back into restoring some of my old S-100 and other CP/M computers put away decades ago. I have been running into old too many floppy drive issues. Just dirty old beast issues and perhaps a few alignment issues. So I just purchased a SCP, dug out an old ATX pwr supply, and have been testing some 5.25" drives for now. Soon as I build an adapter cable and a pwr supply I'll start on some 8" drives. Once I have some tested drives I can work on some controller board issues knowing that it's not a drive causing the problems. Later on a second adapter so I can test 3.5" laptop drives that use a 26 pin ribbon cable. Gives me something to do this upcoming winter and while Covid keeps me inside.
It is one of my favorite purchases. I have been able to image all my old disks and grab images from online to write onto real disks for newly acquired machines.
I acquired a JU-455-5 ... and stumbled down the rabbit hole here. Now, do I dedicate to learning floppy drive repair for 1 single drive? I don't know... but I'm tempted
Very cool video. I may look into one of those.
SuperCard Pro looks great; it's out of stock now but I signed up for availability notifications. I've found ZoomFloppy (and/or OpenCBM, not sure which to blame) fairly frustrating as it deals very poorly with errors on the disks, which happens quite often when archiving a bunch of old floppies. When you do your follow-up video, I'd love to see how it deals with bad disks.
Jim said he should have some more the first part of March. I will cover disk errors for sure. Something else interesting I found what that the JU-475 (1.2M drive) and (JU-455 360K) read some tracks differently. This may be slight differences in alignment or due to the wider head of the 369K drive.
Did you use the 360k drive to image most of the disks or did you also use the 1.2? What about side 2 on disks that don't have a second index hole? KryoFlux can't deal with this at all unless you modify the drive to be able to image both sides at once.
Excellent video and looking forward to seeing the 2nd part.
I have both a KryoFlux and a SuperCardPro and while I have imaged plenty of disks with KryoFlux I haven't yet done the same for SCP. You can write images back to disk fairly easy with the KF, even though it is mostly command line. Last time I used SCP you could only write back SCP flux images. Maybe this has changed in more recent versions?
I first imaged all my C64 disks with the 1.2M JU-475-4 drive. I then tired some of them that had errors with the JU-455 360K drive and was able to recover more data. This might be due to slight differences in alignment, width of the read head, etc. For C64 disks that use half tracks for copy protection you will need a 96TPI drive (1.2M).
The JU-475 1.2M drives have a jumper that tells the drive it can still spin the motor even if it does not see the index signal. In the SCP software you can set it to use the index (for commercial software) or ignore it (for the backside of disks or anything written on a Commodore drive.)
There is other software available to transform SCP files to/from other image formats. I'll cover this in the next SCP video.
@@HeyBirt That is cool that you can enable the motor on side 2. I have a Mitsumi D509V5 (That I can tell) and it seems to have only one jumper that I remember. It does work good for imaging and for writing back to disk. This disks work fine on all my Commodore drives most of the time. And that is usually G64s. Some don't work because they were remastered for emulators. I need to find one of those Panasonic drives it looks like.
@@RacerX- Sometimes drives will have wire jumpers soldered on the PCB. It does seem like the Panasonic drives are more configurable. There is a list on the SCP forum of drives that are known to work and a PDF of jumper settings.
Great video Jeff, really enjoyed that. I’m a sucker for any old floppy drive refurbs and it worked great after a good clean. Does the SCP only interface with PC style drives or dies it also interface with a 1541 ? Looks like PC floppy only. I guess the Zoomfloppy would be what I’d need for a 1541
The SCP interfaces with any drive with a standard style (PC) interface. It does have an header on it labeled 'IEC' which was included for possible someday talking on the Commodore IEC serial bus.
The 130+ disks I archived were all C64 disks and many of them would not work with the ZoomFloppy/1571 drive combo. If there are any sort of errors it just bombs out. The SCP will try multiple times and compare the data it gets back to try and recover the data.
The ZoomFloppy and Commodore drive does have the advantage that you can use it with VICE though. For Archiving I think the SCP is the best tool for the job.
@@HeyBirt- So SCP images of copy protected disks cannot be used directly in Vice, only if rewritten to a physical 1541 disk and connected to the PC via ZoomFloppy (or not even that)?
When imaging a C= disk with the SCP you can choose to save directly to a .D64. You can use the .D64 file in VICE, etc.
If you have an SCP file you can convert that to a .D64 using the SCP software (I think) or other conversion software.
@@HeyBirt - Yes of course a D64 can be used but I was wondering about copy protected images made in SCP format. Those cannot be run in Vice directly?
these Super Card Pro are not for sale right now. I can't find any on 2nd-hand markets. Any tips on where to get one?
Jim @ CBMSTUFF updated the board because a few components were at EOL (end of life, component manufacturers were no longer going to produce them.) He was scheduled to have the new version ready in March but COVID19 got in the way by disrupting the global supply chain.
I don't think I have ever seen one offered second hand. Once you get one of them you don't want to ever let it go :) It is far too useful.
The drive latch handle is friction fit onto the shaft (at least I never found a set screw!) If you pull it off, you can remove the front plate without removing the interlock assembly.
The handle is pressed on but in my experience they are so tight on this type of drive you can't budge them. Or, maybe I'm a wimp :)
Maybe a gentle heating with a hair dryer would enlarge the handle enough to make it a bit looser?
@@HeyBirt Then again, you do have to remove the interlock assembly to get access to all the other components so in your video you did it right.
I've found that only the Teac models of drives allow for the drive latch to come off fairly easy. On my recent Panasonic cleaning (following Birt's lead) I applied what I felt was too much force trying to remove the latch and it didn't budge. The hair dryer idea is good though, may try that if I ever need to tear a non Teac drive down again.
How does Supercard pro compare to the Kryoflux ? It seems that the software and installation is way better on Supercard. Kryoflys is a pain to install drivers for.
I don't have a Kyroflux to compare. Their main purpose of flux level imaging is the same. The SCP is very easy to set up and use. The only 'trick' to installing the software is to right-click on the installer and run as administrator. This is explained well in the manual.
The software works well but could be better documented (but that is true for a lot of software.)
What was the floppy test setup that had the floppy power supply used? Thank you for this video because I need to get something like this
@@circuitsandcigars1278 Are you asking what power supply I used for the floppy drive? If so, it is from a USBIDE adapter kit I bought many years ago (ones used to temporarily hook hard drives to PC through USB for imaging.) You can buy these kits now for less than $20.
For a 5-1/4" floppy you need 5V and 12V for a 3-1/2" floppy you just need 5V and can use the 5V floppy type connector on the SuperCard Pro (if your USB port can supply at least 500ma)
SCP has propper archival file format. Kryoflux file format is just a dump of information between the hardware and the drive. Each track is stored in a separate file and this quickly becomes unwieldy.
I have been adding support for SCP disk images in Pi1541. Anyone wanting to help with testing then please email me.