William R. Walsh wrote:
For all the posters that have suggested dirty heads as a cause, I have only
ever found a few drives that were affected by dirt or dust on the heads. In
many of these cases, the drive was packed full of dust or lint.

You are IMHO, very lucky. While a CD Lens cleaner has saved many a CD/
DVD drive from impacted dust for me, something gets on the heads of many
drives that I see. I often fix up OLD computers (the last one was an 18
year old Mac/SE) and cleaning the heads fixed it right up.

I don't know what was on them, but using a cleaning diskette and 95%
grain alcohol fixed it. Mac drives are special because the have autoloading
mechanisms which gum up and need to be cleaned and relublicated.

Something also comes from the disks themsevles, when trying to read an old
disk I sometimes have to clean the heads to read it.

I use the grain alcohol because at $4 for 750ml, it's cheaper than
anything else and works fine.

Geoff.

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Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
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