Floppy drive broken in HP4145B Parameter Analyzer

HP makes personal computers. Agilent was spun off as a test equipment company a LONG time ago.

Are there any OEM markings on the bad floppy drive? HP/Agilent may not have been the only one to use that drive.

You _might_ be able to cannibalize a 3.5" floppy out of another piece of HP gear of similar vintage. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the floppies were identical, or at least compatible.

Bob Pownall

Also, there was a related thread in the sci.engr.semiconductors group about a year ago.

Re: hp 4145A and 4145B semiconductor parametric analyzers OP: Winfield Hill Date: 8/4/2006

You might be able to come up with some useful information there. Heck, a post to sci.engr.semiconductors might be worth a shot.

Bob Pownall

Try a floppy disc from an old ie mid 80's computer, HP9121 floppy drive (there are a series of these GPIB connected floppys) HP150 computer etc.

Andrew

Of course, it makes sense to figure out why the drives are different. I once got some IBM 3.5" drives that were completely standard, except the edge connector had 4 more contacts, for the power supply. It was really easy to use them, I just had to fix up a suitable connector.

But of course, there were lots of runners up in the 3.5" market, and if these are of that type, then that is likely more complicated. But even then, it would depend on the drive.

Michael

On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 10:17:23 -0700, sunshine put finger to keyboard and composed:

I once modified the floppy drive interface in a Commodore Amiga to accommodate a PC FDD. The differences in that particular case were the Ready and Diskchange pins (2 & 34).

Maybe yours has a Shugart interface (2nd table):

The first table is for a standard IBM FDD.

If you are lucky, and the differences are in the Ready and Diskchange pins, then you *may* be able to find a FDD that can be jumpered for either interface.

Otherwise this simple circuit worked for me:

- Franc Zabkar

Older floppy drives had quite a few jumpers to configure the interface - when PC's arrived, they tended to use settings ( in particular cable select) which were not the 'default' at the time - obviously these settings have now become the default and the links have disappeared, so worth looking for older drives as it may just be a case of setting the links right, or jigging some pins around on the cable to work with a modern drive. I'd guess the most likely difference is that it probably isn't high density, so you may just need to look for a double-density (720K for 3.5" can't remember the capacity for 51/4). If it's a really old 5/4" drive, they also came in 40 and 80 track variants, as well as single or doublke sided.

Take a close look at the old drive to see who actually made it.

Have you established the actual fault? Have you tried cleaning the heads, checking the alignment? Unless the head is physically damaged or worn, these things are repairable, and as older ones tended to use discrete logic etc, reasonably fault-findable.

I assume you've tried another known-working disk to eliminate that...?

Also try posting on the Agilent forum - I've seen long-time HP staff give useful repair pointers here

probably just a common older 750kb single sided 3.5 inch drive.

tear it apart, extract the floppy drive and hack in an ebay unit from some surplus dealer of seller.

that actually may be harder to find since it is "dated"

the floppy drive with

Some HP equipment used a controller board with odd connector, under a standard Sony mechanism. Early Macintosh (800k) floppy disks were similar in the mechanisms, but not the controllers. You can find a similar SONY part and swap the controllers. Maybe.

The first Sony 3-1/2 inch drives ran at 600 RPM, (so they had the same data rate as an 8 inch drive). NEC did a special version of the '765 floppy controller chip for them.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

They were double-sided double-density drives. The published capacity was

Hi there,

I opened the box and found that the floppy drive is a Sony MP-F52W-20 drive. I tried to find such a used drive on ebay and so on but it seems very challenging Does anyone know a good website were you can look up compatibility with other/newer floppy drives?

Thanks! David

Most floppy drives are electrically identical, there's not really anything in the way of intelligence in the drive. Assuming it has a standard 34 pin interface cable, I'd try plugging in a generic PC drive and see what happens.

On Mon, 06 Aug 2007 08:55:18 -0700, sunshine put finger to keyboard and composed:

The prognosis doesn't look good:

It looks like yours is a 600 RPM drive. There is a pinout at the bottom of the page.

- Franc Zabkar

I tried that some years ago with the Sony drive in a 16500A. It did not work.

regards, Gerhard

I used to get some working by cleaning the mechanisms with alchohol (head cleaner) and lubricating the mechaism with an oil that creeps. Clean the heads too. I've seen a sewing machine mechanic use a mixture of Isopropyl and Automatic Transmission fluid. He had a squirt bottle with a 50 / 50 blend.