Compaq Deskpro Part 4: The home stretch! MFM hard drive, keyboard and monitor
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- Опубликовано: 7 янв 2020
- Part 4: And we are done! In this video I will bring the Seagate ST-251 MFM hard drive back to life. I will show how I fix a stretched out and limp coiled keyboard cable and we'll do further testing of the Compaq video adapter in these old machines along with the Compaq Dual Mode Monitor.
0:53 - Techniques I used to bring the ST-251 MFM hard drive back to life
13:41 - Low level format a MFM hard drive on using a WDXT-GEN controller (Western Digital MFM)
24:53 - Fixing the stretched out keyboard cable and a look inside the keyboard
30:24 - Further testing of the Compaq video adapter and Compaq Dual Mode monitor
Part 1: • Exploring the Compaq's...
Part 2: • Compaq Deskpro Part 2:...
Part 3: • Compaq Deskpro Part 3:...
Music:
Francis Preve - Stranger Danger (RUclips Music Library)
Relevant links:
Planet X3 by David Murray: (8-bit Guy)
www.the8bitguy.com/product/pla...
IBM ANSI logo seen on boot of this machine:
github.com/misterblack1/ansil...
Compaq Speed Control Utilities: (first link is the one featured here)
vetusware.com/download/Compaq...
Smart Watch (No-Slock-Clock) better software:
ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/tvdog/tandy1000/utilities/smwy2k.zip
CGA Compatibility Tester:
github.com/MobyGamer/CGACompa...
Speed Stor: (MFM low level formatting utility)
minuszerodegrees.net/software/...
Free VI For DOS:
vetusware.com/download/Free%2... 
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Woo, good stuff! These Compaqs are so cool, been a lotta fun watching this all come together 👍
Needs wood grain, though.
You’re a legend LGR
I'm considered strange sense I'm 13 and wish it was 1987 and want to play with old Computers namely the Commodore 64
Watched all 4 episode's in one sitting, enjoyed them all. Still waiting for part 5.
Yesterday at CES 2020 Adata showed off a SSD that does 7000MBps (7GBps!). Truly amazing. But at the same time I'm not feeling a thing with that at all. I am so happy to have been alive when computers started to evolve and had a personality. The sound of the floppydrives when you turn on the pc. Or the amazingly loud Amiga floppy drive for that matter. Having to park your harddisk heads. Installing your first Adlib sound card. That amber screen gives me goosebumps, also it made CGA bearable :-)
What a great journey this has been. Kudos for keeping this piece of history alive. I truly admire your work Adrian!
My first computer was an Apple II, my second was an 8088 Compact Deskpro! It was a choice between a car or a computer; I made the right choice! This 4 part series brings back great memories, thanks.
Used to make some nice money using spinrite back in the day. Thanks for bringing back those memories. I miss working on machines like this.
The data format on a MFM or RLL-drive is controller dependent. You have to use the same model of controller to read/write it, when you switch machines or you won't be able to access your data or get "defect" sectors because the controller isn't understanding the format the drive was lowleveled with. That's the reason why low-level-format disappeared with ide and scsi drives - they simply contain their controller on-board.
These are the most beautiful computers ever made. Something about the amber screen in combination with the dark brown bezel, keyboard and computer, come together in a total retro beauty. If I could find one in mint condition I would purchase it immediately, even paying as much as a new system. Call me crazy, but this is the pinnacle of retro computers, to me anyways. Unfortunately I don't think I will ever find one as they are as rare as hen's teeth. Anyone has one for sale, hint hint, I am always looking. Keep up the great video's, I look forward to them always.
I remember reading about the coiling process used by phone manufacturers like Ma bell back in the day. After heat forming the coils one direction they then flipped them the other way (CW to CCW for example) which makes them springy and tightly bound.
I remember when I was studying in the 90’s the teacher said there was no such thing as a computer expert but there are specialists in different fields. So we are always learning even if we have used these for decades. That’s what makes computers awesome.
I don't think I've ever seen a RUclipsr suggest that you hit the thumbs down if you didn't like it. Very humble of you, Adrian. Keep up the good work, and two thumbs up from me!
It’s also clever because it’s more “engagement” as far as The Algorithm is concerned. Compared to someone watching, disliking, but simply leaving. Usually it takes a lot to make someone proactively hit dislike compared to hitting like when unprompted, and therefore dissatisfaction is regarded as neutral by the system (or rather, neutrality is regarded as de-facto dissatisfaction, but that it treats a Dislike as being truly moved to action).
This is one of the best channels on youtube. I have got to get out to the Portland Retro gaming expo in hopes of shaking Adrians hand one day and telling him how great his content is.
With MFM drives, the controller does the low-level formatting. Often times this low level format differs from vendor to vendor and even model to model with the same vendor. This means that you won't necessarily be able to read a drive that was formatted on a different controller. Also the low level format is done by the ROM on the controller card. You can access (in most if not all) this low level formatter by running DEBUG and then enter "g=c800:5" to start the ROM formatter. It's not just specific to the WD controller you have here. :)
f15sim And that’s what Adrian did.
Having been a technician back when these were common drives, I can confirm what f15sim said above (changing the controller can cause the drive to not be accessible). When recovering old drives that have been dormant for extended times, a Low-Level format is often required to refresh the drive. If you connect the drive to a different controller, especially when changing from an 8-bit controller to a 16-bit controller as shown in this video you can expect the drive to not be detected or have significant faults. The Older RLL and MFM Drives didn't have any control circuits on the Hard drive itself and would rely on the combination of the controller card and the hard drive to work. This was one of the improvements that began when the IDE drives replaced them because the IDE drive had the full controller on the drive. This change allowed you to move a drive from one PC to another and still be able to access the data.
Well this video brought back memories of things and people I hadn't thought of in, well decades. The moment I saw that drive that debug command popped into my head but I didn't remember about the interleave and bad sector stuff until it came up. Computers were so interesting in those days and you had to really keep up with all the new changes that were happening. Between me and two friends we had twelve pc magazines each month to read. And of course each of us had a favorite person that wrote articles in those magazines, mine was Fred Langa, he also wrote the Langa list, but others liked John Dvorak or, I don't know why, Ed Bott. And for a while many wrote about SpinRite, Steve Gibson and Gibson Research, there was lots of controversy about him back then. I didn't use SpinRite back then but somehow I now have a copy of SpinRite v6. If you think it takes a long time on a 40MB drive try it on a 1TB drive! Sorry I rambled on so much I just really enjoyed that content and all the things it made me remember.
Correct, I was just about to comment the same thing. You cannot expect a disk to be readable by one controller when formatted on another "different" controller.
I forgot how frustrating and rewarding it was to set up the older drives. ; )
Congrats on bringing this beast back to life.
Spinrite is still being produced and a long awaited update to version 6.1 through 6.3 (the current version is 6.0). It has uses on modern PC's however the updates will add compatibility and speed improvements. Steve Gibson is still active and many may know the Security Now! podcast produced by Twit.tv which Steve hosts and has been running since 2005. Episode 743 was released on Tuesday! 😀
A year on and we're still patiently waiting for the new Spinrite. I've been using it since I worked at CompUSA in the late 90s early 2ks and today I still use it working in IT. He is very generous with his licensing and the cost has been more than recovered in the many years of use. Can't wait for the new version.
The whole WD low level formatting with Debug really takes me back! I'd purchased a used HD from a kid on a local BBS. It was my first and I had no room in my case for it, so I fit it into the external drive case that had a defunct floppy drive in it before. It was such a mess but got me through for a while.. Until it didn't! I remember running Norton disk doctor on it for 24 hours straight in the end, but it was a goner.
We had that monitor with the 286 version of the desk pro as a kid. That monitor is freaking amazing. I think it reached peak monochrome.
That "junky" Frye 386 is the exact case that my very first PC had. Have been looking forever for one!
If @Adrian's Digital Basement would ever consider selling it I'd be interested.
This is what 8 year olds used to have to figure out for their parents back in the day(ask me how I know). Kids thrive with projects like this. Kids have lost something with their simple iPhones and iPads nowadays. Youngsters have a hard time with PCs and laptops now because of it.
Hi Adrian, I was cringing watching you struggle with hobs, hot water and heat guns. None of that was necessary. All you needed to do was to twist the cord in the opposite direction, as if you wanted to unwind it, but then carry on. This will give you a very strong and tight coil in just minutes. I have done this many times in my previous life as a support tech. It's counter intuitive, but it works!
Hahah...Hey Adrian, I loved these old Compaq Deskpro's; they were built like a tank in the day. I saw you begin your low-level format adventure (having been there done that) and I said aloud..."debug c800:5" and you went through the popular low level software of the day (in just about the same order including Norton...priceless!) then, onto the debug. This was a very common practice with machines as industry standards were really in flux, companies fighting for control and clones with Frankenstein parts could be found in every computer. Compaq built some great machines from top to bottom and the monitors were great. These machines simply refuse to die.
I've just binge-watched the entire 4-video series on the Compaq Deskpro. This was actually my first computer in the early 90s. My dad got it for nothing from his workplace since this system was too old and they wanted to throw it away. It looked almost identical, the only difference was that it had a green monochrome monitor instead of an amber one. The processor was 8086 or 8088 I don't remember exactly, but I know it didn't have a math coprocessor (I remember opening it up and looking inside with my dad). Also, it didn't have a hard drive installed (I wish it did!....), but it did have those two floppy drives. Indeed, the floppy drives were installed one on the upper-left slot and the other on the upper-right slot. I still remember that the floppy drives only supported 360KB disks, I tried using higher density disks to no avail. Was this the case with this computer? (I am referring to the original floppy drive that went with it, not the second one you installed later?). Also, it was a shock for me to find out that this computer had a turbo mode! I had absolutely no idea! Now I keep wondering whether my system had the green light on or the red one.... I am afraid the red one... :) I feel so bad now for giving this computer away! My next computer was a Pentium 75 (quite a massive upgrade) and we thought we didn't need this one anymore.... I had no idea I would feel so much nostalgia 30 years later. I would even be willing to buy this system from you at the price of a new modern computer! Would you be interested? Or maybe you have another Compaq Deskpro like this? Thank you, Adrian for bringing up good memories!
Adrian this was a great 4 part show i really loved it your intro editing has got a lot better.. i swear i click thumbs up before i watch it :) i know you rock
19:00 "My hypothesis is..." Your hypothesis is correct. I had a similar Western Digital controller with the same low level formatting program in the ROM (I didn't know it could do a virtual drive split; that's interesting!). It saves the information about the drive geometry and even the list of bad sectors, to the first cylinder of the drive. Then while the drive is operating normally, it hides that cylinder by pretending that the drive is one cylinder smaller, and adding 1 to the requested cylinder number, so that when the BIOS wants to access cylinder 0, it really accesses cylinder 1. Of course if you put the drive on a different controller that doesn't do this, the other computer won't see the Master Boot Record so it can't access the drive (I did that, so that's how I found out how it works).
Anyway, kudos for having more patience with SpinRite than I ever had. I never ran it at the "thorough" level and waited until it was done.
Congrats on the Louis Rossmann shout-out, by the way!
2nded, keep up the good work Adrian!
Where did that happen?
What video did Louis give the shout out? I'm behind on my Rossmann views.
@@willierants5880 The one titled "Adrian Black fixes Apple IIc on camera: very cool video! "
.... without complaining about Apple the whole time.
Awesome work! I loving seeing old neglected computers getting a new lease on life. Preservation of computer history is important.
Just watched this series, it took me back to my first PC which was a Compaq 286 Deskpro which had a green screen CGA monitor powered from the PC exactly like your amber one. It also had 1MB of on motherboard memory and a further 1MB on a riser card exclusively for XMS memory. I eventually got an ISA EMS memory card that used SIMs for it and a VGA card. And managed to run X-Wing on it but it was too slow to be playable! Happy times!
For some reason i keep thinking that you say "Compaq flash card" and not Compact.. Hmm, i wonder why... :D
Lovely old machine that. It's been a pleasure to follow these videos.
Thanks for showing the whole process, my parents had this exact machine in the 80’s - early 90’s. Ours had a single 5 1/4” floppy drive, 20MB HD and the same dual mode amber monitor. I used to type my homework with it in middle school and the first part of high school. Major nostalgia seeing this on youtube! There isn’t a whole lot of info on this machine online so it was cool to see this. I can find plenty of info about the Compaq Portable but not the 8086 DeskPro. I remember feeling it was so superior to the original IBM because ours had a 16 bit processor (8086) vs the 8 bit 8088 in the IBM. 😂. It was still in my parent’s basement, in the box, in beautiful condition right up until a few years ago when my brother took it to the scrap yard. I should have grabbed it when I had the chance. ☹️ To most people it’s a pretty worthless machine by modern standards... I guess I’m weird 🤪
Pro tip: coiled cables need to be turned inside out after setting - start at one end, sort of twist it against the thread direction, and then "move" the twist along the length of the cable. The end result is that its tendency to want to uncoil will go in the "wrong direction" and cause it to pull together rather than drift apart.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I used to enjoy being able to play with the hardware and tools. Not so much need to do that now.
Keep it up. The channel just gets better and better!
Congrats on a brilliant result and a lovely computer. I loved the saucepan setup with the thermocouple (doesn't everyone have one in their kitchen?) haha. The diagnostics of the lovely MFM drive were also fascinating. I love those old diagnostic programmes, so handy. Cheers.
Really enjoying this series, brings back alot of memories, seems Louis is also impressed
Thank you for walking us through this, I'm about to go give it a shot on a couple of MFM drives I've got.
Watching all the DOS commands was a trip down memory lane. Thanks for an outstanding series.
The yellowed plastic kind of fits with the amber monitor output. It's very nice as is. Neat that the disk drive still works.
Thanks for the series Adrian, long way but worth it. It was amazing :) waiting for the next one.
My 40meg drive took about 4hrs to low level format. It has on a home built pc. The shop were confused when I bought the motherboard and micro but not the bios. This saved me 1/2 a weeks wages! My boss had bought the bios the day before so I just copied his. Work also supplied the eprom :)
What an impressive piece of old tech engineering again! I have some old PC skils, but never diagnosed hard drives this deeply. Perhaps a bit late anno 2019, but still very nice information to know.
Really enjoyed this series, the first computer that I got to play with ( besides school computers) was our neighbors IBM 5170. Loved that thing, we bugged that poor guy to death but he was cool. This brought back some great memories, thanks. New sub BTW.
Thanks and thanks!
Really great stuff as usual, I've really enjoyed this series and seeing everything come together.
I wonder if the reason the suggested interleave kept changing was because sometimes you’d boot in turbo mode and sometimes not. I know cpu speed can make a difference.
Great video by the way. Now I’m finally trying out a NOS ST-251-1 I recently picked up. Thanks for the inspiration!
Nice video! Totally love your channel Adrian!
Keep up the good work!
I really enjoyed this series so far. Can't wait to see the retrobrite!
I enjoyed this series thoroughly. Thanks for making it!
Nice job so far with that Compaq. It's come a long way to being up-n-running.
This has been a good set of videos on the Compaq, i haven't seen many youtubers go in-depth with the more "boring" technical stuff like low-level formatting an MFM drive. I've been getting a lot of the same "cleanup and retrobright" type of stuff in my feed, so this was a refreshing and cosy series.
Really enjoyed this series on the Compaq. I might take your coil trick for cables and use it to tidy some of the longer ones lying on my own desk.
Keep up the good work, looking forward to your next video.
Wow, what a journey; well done 👍
This has been a great series. Looking forward to the next one. I used to work for IBM back in the mid 80s as a PC tech, and remembered all the debug commands that was used for LL Formatting. I too used SpinRite, plus heaps of other tools to help fix up drives that had failures.
Darn these videos! Now I'm looking for my own Deskpro on eBay and Craigslist! Thanks so much for this series. It has really taken me back, in a GOOD way.
Awesome you use Spinrite!!! I used that program regularly after getting a copy of it from an acquaintance on a floppy back when I got my first PC (a genuine IBM PC/XT) in 1993, it's 30 MB MFM disk was starting to have read errors and such, and SpinRite would get the HDD sorted out without any data loss involved.
Excellent series. I really enjoyed it. Thanks!
A lot of XT and AT era disk controllers had the ability to translate the physical heads/cylinders/tracks of newer drives in to virtual heads/cylinders/tracks to match the limited options of older system BIOSes. By running the debug command you ran the microcode on the controller to configured the controller to translate the ST 251-1 physical specifications to virtually match the limited BIOS settings.
Awesome videos! I appreciate you taking the time and putting in effort into making this system functional again. I currently have the same system in my possession, mine even has the Intel 8087 math coprocessor. The three errors I need to work on are 401 (parallel port 1), 601 (bad floppy drive), and 1701 (bad hard drive). This video series will help me out significantly with my project and I look forward to seeing how it turns out in the future.
I really like your videos, Adrian! Ha, I wish I could hang out with you sometime and talk about vintage computers. I'm building up a fairly big collection now, and there is always more to learn!
I had forgotten about using debug to access the firmware on the WD controller card! I had to do the same on my Amstrad PC1512, it had a 'hard card' upgrade in it (same WD controller as you and a 32MB HDD all mounted on a special bracket so it all fit in the expansion card bay).
on some refurbishments i did on a compaq portable II and III, i used pc/at keyboard extension cables, just cut off the female ends and soldered directly into the keyboards and worked great and fit great into the cases.
I seriously miss getting into the nitty-gritty of computers back in the day. Sure, I wouldn't trade the power we have now -- but tinkering like we used to back then would just destroy modern machines. *nostalgia alert* By the way, my first hard drive was a full-height, 5 1/4" *20 meg* drive. Hehehe yep. And when it was seeking, my whole desk would vibrate. Freaking loved that machine
Stretch-cable note: if I recall correctly, the trick is that _after_ the cable cools back down, you then _reverse the twist pattern,_ so that each turn of the coil will _want_ to move _through_ it's neighbor to return "home". This results in more restorative force, and thus a tighter coil.
That also explains why once I’d accidentally twisted one round on the house wall phone, it never went back how it was! Guess if we’d wrapped it round a dowel and heated it everything would’ve been as new again (if we figured to counterwind it, at least,)
Great videos! You've gotten me excited to show my 8086 project too!
Wow neat trick with re-coiling the cable! I'll have to give that a shot!
Nice job on the Hard-drive. I love Compaq computers, built to last.
Great stuff as always. Really enjoy your content!
Brings back memories, my first hard drive was 40 meg one. I never thought I ever fill it up? Just shows how small programs were in the old days.
I remember Seagate disk manager. I used it to get my full height 1.3GB SCSI drive working with my 386.
And OMG that purple 386 BIOS!!!! THE FEELS!!!
really enjoyed this series adrian!
Thanks, Adrian. Great video!
When framing your static shots like pointing at your computer screen or your desk where you're just trying to show us something, set your focus once, disable auto-focus and then start recording. Your camera is constantly hunting for focus and doing this will prevent it from jumping around continuously like at the 31 minute mark where you've framed up the monitor but the focus is shifting constantly as you introduce and move your hands around inside the shot. Hope this helps!
If you ever run across a full length HDD controller card with an 80186 CPU in the lower left corner, I'd love to hear about it. It is a Diskmaster dual drive controller from Cogent Data Technologies. I worked for them for 11 years and this was our first product and my first design for them. It was the fastest 8-bit disk controller on the market and used a digital data separator and a bus mastering DMA interface. We used only 1:1 interleave and could switch heads within a sector, and provided an option for data mirroring between the two attached drives. Fun project. We later made PC-AT and MCA versions. Thanks for the memories.
@@adriansdigitalbasement If you see one of these, it may be marked as a 'Database Machine'. This was the intended purpose, as a way to perform database operations at the site of the data to avoid sending all the data back-and-forth. It worked brilliantly, but so hard for a small startup to find customers. We repurposed it as a high-speed disk controller and had somewhat better sales. I was fortunate to retire from Intel, where I worked for the group designing their SSDs - now that's fast.
Great job, Adrian! Can't wait to see it after Summer's retrobrite!
Spinrite is a GREAT program, it does work and works very well, it was written in machine code so it is fairly small. I still have the version that I purchased, around $70.00. Don't use it anymore but it was great for the old drives.
The data path on MFM is analog, so the same disk may indeed be unreadable via other controller if it was written with another one
Im suprised that your mfm drive even works. Back in the all you had to do is breathe on them, hdd crash. Seeing that old 386 american megatrends bios screen brought back memories..
Finally! No offence, now I can binge watch this weekend. I was saving them up.
This multipart format is awesome.
Spinrite was always the best utility out there for hard drives back in the day. I still use some of his modern ML utilities. :)
Another awesome video as always ❤️👍
Great video! You earned a sub. I love MFM drives and I had the exact same issues yesterday with the same drive. funny... Greetings from CPU-Galaxy
Well done, Sir! It's always a pleasure to see one of these old "war-horses" being brought back to life. 😃
BTW "Degradation of magnetic flux" is also sometimes called "bit rot."
@@adriansdigitalbasement That does indeed sound very plausible. In the end, though, you did succeed, and i imagine that must have been quite satisfying. I must confess that I have no personal experience with such old PC hardware; i only started using PCs in around 1998, before that i used an Amiga 1200, and even earlier, a ZX Spectrum +3 - the one with the built-in disk drive. Still, I would be interested in delving deeper into the old PC stuff, as and when my finances permit ;)
It’s great you were able to save the HD great series really enjoyed it
Thanks Adrian... Love your channel!
Nice video, as always. But I didn't know format c: plays such a nice tune in the background. ;-)
Another cool thing about the Compaq dual mode Monochrome monitor is that it also supports EGA (640x350 for instance) and 64 greyscales over TTL RGB!
The little 9" internal monitor on the Portable 1 is essentially the same thing and also supports EGA :-) The Portable is pretty similar to the Deskpro but it has a 8088 instead of a 8086 as it's an older machine...
I really enjoyed that!
Excellent job!
Last night I fixed a 10Mhz 286 I got as a birthday present when I was ~14. It was a surplus unit with a bad FDC. I previously diagnosed it as having good motor and seek control, but wouldn't read data. I found some floppy controller chips in my stash and when I was warming up the desoldering station I noticed no pin sticking through one of the holes. It turns out that in 1987 when the OEM stuffed the board, one of the pins was curled up under the FDC and only barely made connection with the wave solder blob. Over the years, oxidation and vibration made the connection poor and non-functional. I just stuffed a resistor leg through the hole and made good connection, the result was a working on-board floppy controller! I've had this computer for nearly 30 years and it blows my mind that it shipped from the factory in 1987 with this defect. Now I need to find my PLCC remover tool and remove/clean/reseat the chipset because it's being flaky. I plan to try and burn an AMI BIOS for this board because the one it has is junk, the only complication is that it had a soft turbo capability that rebooted at 8 or 10Mhz (it powers on at 6Mhz). I think I'll snarf the BIOS and disassemble it to try and find how they toggled the frequency. This uses the C&T 82c20x chipset and has only 640KB of RAM, with a VME type socket for RAM expansion. Of course it's an orphan...but it has sentimental value.
It took 37 hours for Norton to non-destructively change my 20MB hard drive interleave from 4:1 to 3:1 on my IBM 5155.
you can restore a lot of spring back into ur coiled cable by simply reversing the coil by hand if you spin one end of it opposite to how it sits after heating it it will slowly reverse the oil and you will find that that alone with no heat can restore a lot of spring to the cable...this is usually what we do with these after manufacturing them after heat treatment we reverse the coil and that interduces a much tighter spring to it and is a great way to easily add a bit more snap to an older coiled cable without any heat or tools just do it by hand
the first PC multisync scrt... this is really mind blowing, i had no idea!
Wow Spinrite even back then? Such an awesome program. It really does fix the problem long enough to get the data off and image the drive! Often the OS and data is as the owner left it once the image has copied back to a shiny new drive. Shame it didn’t work too well on your drive 😩
Ah Cable Soup. A change from Cable Spaghetti
MFM and RLL drives are tied to the controller they were originally low-level formatted with, because the drive itself has no controller onboard like IDE drives. Every Drive-Controller pair is unique due to the analog signals between them. Even smallest differences matter here. So if you change the controller You are fthen forced to low-level format the drive. Each and every IDE Drive has the same Issue, but Ibecause DE Drives carry their own controller around, the Drive-Controller pair never gets splitted up.
Awesome!
If you use an RLL controller and do a low level reformat, you get 63MB out of that drive. I did that too with my first XT PC.
I even wrote a driver that made it possible to use part of the Gaps between the sectors to write data.
Blimey, seeing spinrite took me back to my early pc days :)
I remember reading a while back that a Low level format should be performed annually on stepper motor drives. Due to expansion and contraction as well as mechanical wear in the stepper motor and mechanism it is possible for the heads to fall out of alignment with the tracks on the disk. A low level format places new tracks on the disk and as such are in alignment with the new position of the heads.
I had an 8086 based Deskpro model that had the badge "Compaq 251 Deskpro." I am still trying to find that exact model... I have seen google results on occasion, but not always. I miss that machine!
This is great, I have several MFM hard drives I need to check
I hope you didn't make the mistakes Adrian made! These drives get low-level formatted to the specific PC. You will not be able to recover data unless you have the original PC, and it will appear damaged even when its not, when put into another PC. Keep that in mind!
The reason why the USB cable doesn't hold the shape of being coiled is because of the wire conductors rather then the outer sheathing. Coiled Cables typically use paper thin ribbon conductors wrapped around some fiber like material. This way the conductors can stretch with no problem and the outer sheathing keeps a memory retention. I typically use Coil Cables for projects.