sticky Sony 3.5" drive in HP disk drives

Frank, You should have found this covered in the archives. I've posted it numerous times before. All the HP double sided floppy drives (9133, 9122, IPC drives, etc) have this problem. The grease used on them dries up and makes the mechanism stick. If you're not carefull the disk will catch on the upper head and tear it off completely or at least damage the R/W head's mount spring and throw it out of alignment. Be VERY careful inserting or removing a disk from one of these drives. To fix the drive, remove it from the chassis, remove it's cover and clean off the old grease using alcohol or another solvent. I have used spray carburator cleaner but I'm leary of it since it blasts stuff all over the place and I think it has enough pressure that it could tear a R/W head off or damage it's mounting spring. I usually just use alcohol and pour it over the sides of the drive and then use lint free towels and Q-tips to clean the grease off. Repeat several times to get all the old grease off. I try to avoid getting the alcohol and/or old grease in the rest of the drive especially the heads. Once you get the old grease off the mechanism should work pretty freely. I then relube it sparingly with a good quality gun grease. Gun grease is usually a high quality grease that won't gum up with age. I also clean the R/W heads while I have it apart. Replace the cover, reinstall the drive and it should work fine. Joe At 06:18 AM 10/20/03 -0700, you wrote: