We’ve had a few readers run into to problems with floppy drive mechanisms failing in their keyboards, possibly due to them being transported incorrectly.
It is important to remember to park the drive heads in your equipment’s disk drives before you transport them. Parking secures the drive internal mechanism of a drive in such a way that it doesn’t move around and damage itself during transport. Many floppy disk drives can be parked by executing a load command without a disk in the drive and then powering down the machine. Your drives may be different or may not require parking at all. Refer to the owners manual or contact the manufacturer for details.
Editor’s note: Back in the “good old days” all hard drives always had to be parked in order to be moved at all. One could literally destroy a HD platter by carrying a drive across the room without parking it. Nowadays it is extremely rare to find a HD that has to be parked for any kind of transport.