I was reading this thread as my HP1653B I acquired as an unknown condition without OS system discs University of Oregon surplus sale item for $40 was adamantly reporting the floppy had failed.
Even after jumping through all the hoops mentioned here and elsewhere to get a floppy in the right format with the right image - which involved reviving a retired desktop and loading MS-DOS 6.22 onto the not failed drive of the old RAID pair on the box, LIFUTIL finally ran without complaining about track 0. And yet, the floppy drive still sat there grunting at the disk and refusing to load.
I had noticed that the mechanism was reluctant to pop out the eject button - I had to push in the disk and jiggle it, and only then would the button slide out and the disk settle in. A bit of contact cleaner made it more responsive, so I assumed grime and accumulation of dust and neglect in the decades since it was new. Maybe even a bit of a spill of a late night Coke during a marathon debug session? Anyway, the disk was now seating properly, eject button pops out adroitly, and still the drive just grunts.
Ok, time to get out the TORX bits and take the case apart, lets have a look see at the drive and how to get a replacement in. Drive seems clean and pristine, and shiny and no evidence of corrosion or abuse. However, I also noticed the head carriage was stuck and observing the drive power up, noticed it didn't do the expected home seek jiggle. Hmm. head carriage should slide freely and easily, and gentle encouragement of it when it was trying to move proved ineffective - hell, it wasn't moving at all. A bit of a side-to-side shudder, is the best I could coax out of it. But no linear movement.
Get out my handy-dandy picks and pokes and prod around in the slide and linear bearing and it feels a little grungy - the slide rod is not smooth as I expect it to be - it looks clean and pristine, just doesn't feel smooth when I slide my stainless steel feeler over it. Aha - Coke spill got into the drive proper, and sugar coated the slide, and glued it in position, perhaps? So I apply some leverage, and then some more, and then some force, and then I give up and think I will have to go the route of replacing the drive. So then, if this is a broken drive, why not use some brute force? It's a lost cause, anyway. So I give it a last desperate twerk, and the mechanism gummily moves a bit! yay. I apply some contact cleaner and it slides a bit more freely, so I am encouraged. Alas, even with the cleaner and a bit of gentle scraping of the slide rod, which now feels smooth, and I can move the head carriage by hand, the drive still wont move it under it's own power. I can see it trying, and if gently poked, will judder a few mm in one direction or another, but it's still mostly stuck. Sigh... I might have to take the whole drive apart to give the mechanics a good clean in an ultrasonic bath. But also, I have another idea - contact cleaner is designed to clean and wipe and evaporate, so perhaps it was just dissolving the sugar, and allowed the slide to free up momentarily before evaporating and letting the sugar re-gum up the works. So time to try a more invasive option - my LPS-1 lubricant - again, it was a last ditch attempt, and if it ruins the drive then all was already lost, anyway. Of course, its a spray can, and it was late and I was in no mood to go hunting for Q-tips to apply a little to the spot in need - I did use the little red tube to get 'only' the slide mechanism and the head carriage and the optical sensor and the home plate and the base plate a slight dusting of the lubricant. Well, slight dusting is a euphemism dripping with oil... these are pretty small parts, and a drop or two was all I really needed, but, well, it was late.
To my delight, the head carriage now moves with ease when I move it by hand, so at least the Coke sugar has definitely been eliminated. I have a concern that the heads are also now coated with the lubricant, as is most of the head carriage. But cleaning the heads I can do later - does the drive at least do the home seeking and motion test? So plug in the cable, power up the instrument, and - YAY - the drive spins, the head carriage moves smoothly to the inside track, and back home. And the screen says , drive - no disc. Brilliant - huge improvement from drive - FAILED. I figure - well, the disc I have been playing with this whole time, I can create a new one and recreate it, might as well pop it in to see what happens. So I do.
Disc loads, spins up, heads load, and start to incrementally move inwards - Holy Cow! Screen is showing the olden days equivalent of a spinning hour-glass. It says - Loading System...
And then - hallelujah - the setup screen shows up! I whooped, yelped and jumped up and down.
A quick run through of the scope shows it is functional, and the state and timing machines are happy, though I have not tested those with actual signals yet. I expect these to be completely functional, as well.
Motto - Coke is your friend but not when applied to your analyzer.
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