Floppy Drive - Dead?

[Ruler2112]

I recently was given an old laptop by a friend of mine. It had an external PCMCIA floppy drive, but it didn't work. Of course, I disassembled it - found that the sliding door part of a floppy was stuck in it. In the process of extracting it (or before - I'm not sure), the lower read/write head came loose. It looks like it was attached with glue. The rear of the head was rounded and the plastic area it went in was rounded. I figured that it wouldn't be difficult to remedy, so I cleaned out the glue, put in some superglue, lined up the curved part of the head base with the curved part etched into the plastic, and called it good. Reassembed the entire thing and the disks now load and unload properly (had to fix a bent piece of metal as well - something heavy had been dropped on the drive at some time in the past), and windoze 95 recognizes when there's no disk in the drive. However, when I load a disk, the motor actuates a few times moving the head back and forth, then stops and the light remains on. That's the end of it.

I'm thinking that I don't have the bottom head lined up perfectly. Does anybody have any experience with something like this or know how to line the heads up correctly? I'd like to load DOS6 or Linux on it, as it REALLY crawls with the install of 95 (486/25 with 4 meg), but have no way to transfer data to or from it to the outside world. (I was thinking of a laplink cable and a serial port is listed, but all that I see on it are a VGA, parallel, power, and a really weird looking one that I've never seen before; not a standard serial port.)

[Bovon]

The drive is out of alignment..possibly when you re-glued the head. The heads must be precisely on the track or it will not read...usually telling you that the disk is not formatted (when you know it is) and do you want to format it.

It is also possible that the drive was dead even before this...due to the mistreatment it has had. Floppy drives are not rugged..and a little mistreatment and they are goners.