Kawai Synthesizers

Yes, the Q-80 is an inscrutable beast... I too have had disk drive 
problems recently. As with so many instruments from this era, the 
drives invariably go sour with age. This is usually due to the belt 
that drives the unit being loose. Fortunately, manufacturers no 
longer use these damned belt driven devices, but we must deal with 
their past mistakes. You can search for a replacement belt, or find 
a suitable rubber band. Also I've heard that you can lightly sand 
the pulleys that the belt rides on with emery paper, so that the 
belt grips them. Does the Q-80 use a belt drive? I don't know, but 
somebody should take a look. I bet it does. However, right at the 
beginning of the manual, it mentions that you should clean the drive 
heads if you are having read and write errors. I bought one of those 
FDD cleaning kits, and I will use it soon and post my results. 
As for replacing the drive with a new one, these old machines tend 
to very picky about that, and you must be careful to use a 
compatible drive. The Q-80 uses double sided, double density disks, 
but if you're having trouble finding 2DD disks, try formatting a 2HD 
disk in it, and then it may just use 720k of that disk as if it were 
a lower density. So letfs get to the bottom of this and please post 
your findings and help keep this lumbering dinosaur of a sequencer 
afoot.