At least it didn't explode: Part 3
Nov. 20th, 2016 03:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psipsyGetting back to the Amiga for this.
Remember the Amiga from a few posts ago? And how it stopped working? Turns out the hard drive is what's dying.
The Quantum ProDrive ELS line of SCSI drives were used extensively in the Amigas, as well as in early pre-IDE Apple computers. They also had a bit of a problem that manifested many years later.
When the hard drive parks the heads, it does so on a spot near the center of the platter, where there isn't any data stored. And there's typically a stop to prevent the heads from swinging in too close to the center. Well, in the case of this particular model, that stop is made of rubber, which breaks down and turns gooey after many years. So not only did it let the head swing too close to the center, but the gooey-ness of it prevented the head from swinging back out when it was powered on.
I learned this because there are a handful of videos about this issue, and all of them say the way to fix it (temporarily) is to remove the cover on the drive and manually move the heads. This needs done every time the drive is power cycled. So I figured, might as well try it myself. I'd like to say now that newer drives are much harder to take apart. On the Quantum, there are 6 #2 Philips screws holding the lid on, and that's it.
Sure enough, the head was too far back, and it needed a good shove to get it loose again. So I left it loose, put it all back together, and turned everything on. And it works. It wasn't supposed to. Everything I knew about hard drives said that opening them up in a non-cleanroom was a death sentence for it, but there it was.
Since I got it running, I went about the process of getting all of the data off of it, because there's no guarantee it'll work again. Sure, the drive is only 80MB, and it's about 20% full, so that's only 16MB of data. Should go quick, right? Haha, no. The only realistic way to transfer is by serial port. So it's like trying to download a 16MB file on bad dialup.
I did get all of the data from the drive, thanks to the serial cable voodoo. I did a power cycle and it quit working. Everyone who said to reach in and move the heads manually also said that eventually, after doing that enough, the drive will fail permanently. What's next? I can either look for another sub-1GB SCSI hard drive (the SCSI card won't work with anything bigger), or attempt to properly fix this one by cleaning the rubbery goo and putting in a different material as a stop. That involves physically removing the platter. To do that right, I'd have to take it to work, go into one of the cleanrooms, and do the surgery there.
Another problem I'm running into is one of the floppy drives is worn out. These aren't normal drives either. The Amiga formatted them in 880k, which is impossible for a bog-standard floppy drive that everyone else used. I suppose I could find one online, as there are places that are dedicated to Amiga parts. That's full of unknowns as well.
At this point, I think I'm doing this for the sense of conquest. Just to say that I can and did. Yes, I did ask myself early on if I should be doing this. Oh well. I'll figure out what to do.
Remember the Amiga from a few posts ago? And how it stopped working? Turns out the hard drive is what's dying.
The Quantum ProDrive ELS line of SCSI drives were used extensively in the Amigas, as well as in early pre-IDE Apple computers. They also had a bit of a problem that manifested many years later.
When the hard drive parks the heads, it does so on a spot near the center of the platter, where there isn't any data stored. And there's typically a stop to prevent the heads from swinging in too close to the center. Well, in the case of this particular model, that stop is made of rubber, which breaks down and turns gooey after many years. So not only did it let the head swing too close to the center, but the gooey-ness of it prevented the head from swinging back out when it was powered on.
I learned this because there are a handful of videos about this issue, and all of them say the way to fix it (temporarily) is to remove the cover on the drive and manually move the heads. This needs done every time the drive is power cycled. So I figured, might as well try it myself. I'd like to say now that newer drives are much harder to take apart. On the Quantum, there are 6 #2 Philips screws holding the lid on, and that's it.
Sure enough, the head was too far back, and it needed a good shove to get it loose again. So I left it loose, put it all back together, and turned everything on. And it works. It wasn't supposed to. Everything I knew about hard drives said that opening them up in a non-cleanroom was a death sentence for it, but there it was.
Since I got it running, I went about the process of getting all of the data off of it, because there's no guarantee it'll work again. Sure, the drive is only 80MB, and it's about 20% full, so that's only 16MB of data. Should go quick, right? Haha, no. The only realistic way to transfer is by serial port. So it's like trying to download a 16MB file on bad dialup.
I did get all of the data from the drive, thanks to the serial cable voodoo. I did a power cycle and it quit working. Everyone who said to reach in and move the heads manually also said that eventually, after doing that enough, the drive will fail permanently. What's next? I can either look for another sub-1GB SCSI hard drive (the SCSI card won't work with anything bigger), or attempt to properly fix this one by cleaning the rubbery goo and putting in a different material as a stop. That involves physically removing the platter. To do that right, I'd have to take it to work, go into one of the cleanrooms, and do the surgery there.
Another problem I'm running into is one of the floppy drives is worn out. These aren't normal drives either. The Amiga formatted them in 880k, which is impossible for a bog-standard floppy drive that everyone else used. I suppose I could find one online, as there are places that are dedicated to Amiga parts. That's full of unknowns as well.
At this point, I think I'm doing this for the sense of conquest. Just to say that I can and did. Yes, I did ask myself early on if I should be doing this. Oh well. I'll figure out what to do.
