Dude I’m 57 years old and my first job right out of college was at a company that sold these computers in my country. You have no idea how many of these things I put together, upgraded, and installed. People looked at you like you came from outer space. Ohhh the memories. Of course these were extremely expensive back then (early 80s) so I used a Franklin ACE1000 for school work. I still have it too. Anyhow, I ended up moving to Miami and my first computer here was the IBM PC 5160. Got it as a gift from my boss; it came from a mechanic shop and it was covered in grime. Cleaned it all up, and it looked brand spanking new. I later replaced the motherboard for one the used a Z80 processor, can’t remember the name of it. I think I ended up giving it to GoodWill. Man we’ve come a loooooong way. 😅
Since this video I was able to archive the contents of the MFM drive by putting the original controller in my 5150 with the CF-IDE adapter and copying the files to the CF card in there. I would still like to hear how other people do it though. Especially putting an MFM drive like this in an AT class computer like a 486 which is easier to do archival work with. I also noticed a mistake where I misinterpreted the size of the files in a directory as the remaining disk space available towards the end. Opps.
Please archive that ROM as well ... I acquired a Xebec 1220 controller a while ago that was apparently shipped in some 5160 machines. One of the 4 jumperable HDD types actually supports 10mb at most.
Do you mean the 5160 BIOS ROM or the one on the MFM controller? I'm guessing MFM. That MFM controller seems uncommon so I should probably do that sooner than later.
A friend of mine got a Toshiba T3100e which was used for controlling a machine in a printing house. He asked me to install MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 some (roughly) period correct software and games on it, etc. I used a null modem cable and Total Commander's serial plugin so I could move data between the T3100e and one of my Dell Latitude laptops I had at the time (ran Windows 7) and it worked out fine. Sometimes I was getting timeout errors because of the lousy USB to serial adapter cable, but it wasn't that bad. Not the best picture of the setup, but that's the only I have: ibb.co/tLHhRKq
MFM drives were actually quite resilient providing you remembered to park the heads after each work session. That video card is bent, I don't think it's a faulty chip. Also if you go on collecting more IBM machines remember that beep code (one long - pause - 2 short), it's the standard "bad video card" warning.
I remember using the park command on my old IBMs. They were old when I had them. I had a 10mb drive, and I think one with a 20mb drive, both the full height and a half height. It would be kind of neat to still have had them around, but they have been gone for decades now along with an IBM Portable. It is cool to see some of them still operating and people enjoying working with them though.
5 лет назад+14
I'm impressed! have even the plastic protection that is too rare!
Wow, this was my first “real” computer, that I got in 1994 with a 2400 baud modem, monochrome display, 20 MB MFM hard drive, and 640K expansion board with real-time clock. Got onto the internet (via shell account) and dialed a lot of BBSs with that thing. My previous computer was a TRS-80 Model 4, but all I had with it was VisiCalc and LeScript. No terminal emulation software so I couldn’t get an old 300 baud acoustic-coupled modem I found working with it. No games either, but I could write my own and it had a printer, at least. Anyway I upgraded that old XT several times, adding a 10 MB IDE hardcard and Hercules display adapter. That allowed me to run Windows 3.0 which was incredibly slow, but got me Solitaire lol. That old computer taught me a lot, and it jumpstarted my lucrative 25-year IT career despite being a three-time dropout with an eighth-grade education. With the right experience, education doesn’t matter in this industry, for which I’m grateful.
The original IBM MDA and CGA card both use the same ROM chip. So you can try swapping the ROM from either another MDA card or a CGA card onto the faulty MDA card to see if that fixes the problem.
You should put the MDA card in the 5150 and the cga card in the 5160. That's what I did with mine. Then ega card for at AT 5170 and VGA in a PS/2. It's cool to see the progression in the IBM PC line.
It did look suspiciously like it wanted to be a banana. I suspect heat for the years this thing was in service warped the board. Not uncommon with those old giant cards. Also possible this computer was stored on its side for several years and that warped it.
That's why old PCs had those rails at the front of the chassis. A full length card would slide into one of those rails to prevent just that from occurring, though in this case it seems to have sagged in the middle instead. You'll notice that the monochrome card has the chips aligned perpendicular to the length of the board, where the other ones are aligned parallel to the board.
1 Long beep, followed by 2 short beeps means there is a display issue. In your case I would guess that the switch block is configured incorrectly (is set for a card with a BIOS, EGA and beyond, but you're using one without a BIOS). So the next question is how early a 5160 that is. I am guessing really early based on the fact that it has the earlier MDM controller card and XT-IDE problems.
I figured it was probably that but when it worked after I put in the other card I got side tracked by being amazed it booted. I'll get it corrected when I open it next.
I like how methodical and detailed is this video about the xt pc. I had one gifted and sadly I broke it and disassemble. But I still wish for fix it with modern caveats.
@3:19 Man, those ST-225s were indestructible!!! Great machine, dude. I have a 5160 as well! The last time it worked was in the mid-2000s. It was in storage for a while, and when I tried to fire it up the other day, I got nothing :(
@@rawr51919 Yeah, I took it apart and pulled each card one at a time to see if it made any difference, but nothing positive happened. The power supply works and the mighty full height hard drive still spins up, but I get no error beeps, no video, etc. I haven't done any in depth testing on it :/
I'm impressed with your expertise. I acquired an IBM PC XT many moons ago (20 years?) when my place of employment decided it was taking up too much storage space. So, I got it for free. Took it home, set it up and without the precautions you took here, turned it on. Presented with a system utterly unfamiliar to me, I then put it into storage with my mostly Commodore and other archaic consumer computers...where it has remained for all these years. Maybe I should check out what these machines bring on eBay, but I suspect not much. Likely a lot less than shipping costs, right?
I have one of these myself, but just the system unit. Same revision with the 10MB drive. I did upgrade the CPU to an NEC V20 and changed the drive to a 40MB ST-251 and WD controller. Had to use an 8-bit VGA so I could use a flat panel screen that is shared with my modern computers.
another difference between the 5150 and 5160 is the 5150 has a cassette tape port next to the keyboard, the 5160 doesn't (since they were never used, plus the extra expansion slots). Something thats usually overlooked.
4:50 - I really lucked out when building my 486 gaming DOS PC. Found both a CompatiCard & UniDOS card from MicroSolutions still in their boxes with diskettes and manuals at my local recycler (who've since shut down, unfortunately.) The CompatiCard lets you connect up to four drives and includes an external connector. They can be any combination of HD, DD, or SS in 3.5", 5.25", and even 8" drives with support for CP/M diskettes and drives with the accompanying UniDOS card. You can manually set the TPI for each drive using jumpers. You can set the card up as a primary controller (if no onboard controller) or as a secondary controller if you have onboard or a different controller card. Additionally, the card can also be set as tertiary and quaternary controller card with up to 4 CompatiCards installed simultaneously for up to 16 floppy drives, 18 if you have an onboard controller. I'm sure there were some use-case scenarios for having so many floppy drives, especially in a university setting. So my gaming PC has a 1.44MB 3.5", a 1.2MB 5.25", and a 360KB 5.25". I don't own an 8" drive, but it'd be fun to find one and play with those giant floppies. :D
Stefan Gies in this motherboard it will be not any increased performanse ,you have to be with Turbo XT ,just like if you put 8086 if the motherboard do not support 16 bit bus it will run like a 8088 with 8 bit bus
@@intel386DX You should have a look at Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20 The NEC V20 (μPD70108) was a processor made by NEC that was a reverse-engineered, pin-compatible version of the Intel 8088
Nice score... I picked up two 5160s last yr on a whim never owning one before. The 1st one was $100, and the reason I got it was because all the 8 slots were filed with cards and had one full sized floppy and two st-225 Hds and to my surprise when I checked out all the cards it had a MDA vid card and an EGA vid card in it along with a 286 accelerator card in slot 8, that was a 256K motherboard that has a six pack plus that was in it to round out the ram. The 2nd one was $50 from an e-waste recycler and that one had two half height floppies and one st-225 Hd and a CGA vid card plus it was a 640k board fully populated. I put a XT-CF ECO-LITE XTIDE in the first 5160 and it booted perfectly fine, I guess I got lucky as both machines fired up fine with no electrical problems except I havent yet gotten any of the st-225s to access and the full sized tandon drive in the first machine didnt work until I watched your older video and soaked the stepper motor bearings with a little oil and it works fine except the heads are misaligned and it writes floppies only it can read. =/
I still have mine along with a few hdd, spare cards and mother boards. They buried deep in the garage. Will they ever be worth anything? I'm probably going to downsize in a few years. The people that Used These machines will reach the end of their careers in the next 15 year's so there will be no emotional attachments to the hundreds of hours spent on these machines. There is something so satisfying about the mechanical click of those keyboards. Thanks for the video. Very nostalgic.
There is an serial controller on that one? Use Norton Commander on it and another computer. It lets you transfer over serial. It’s not super quick but it’s just 10 MB so won’t take that long. :)
I wonder why the 2-drive "standard PC" floppy controller won out against the 4-drive Shugart controller. Tandy 1000's were using Shugarts all the way til the final RSX model, which could make installing replacement drives a bit intimidating for the uninitiated (usually just need to make a custom cable)
Laplink or Brooklyn bridge with a null modem cable or laplink parallel cable will let you access the drive from another computer. Alternatively, you can get a NE2000 network card or parallel network card and copy it over the network Finally, MS DOS backup utility will let you make a backup that you can restore to another computer. Laplink would be the least messy. But I think you'd get a lot of utility out of a parallel network adapter.
If you want, I have some MDA games, and they are not only text, but also action. Also to your question, you can use both disks together, XT ide and also Seagate ST-412. So you can pretty easily archive your ST drive to XT-ide.
Great video thanx! Looking forward to that separate video on the LED mhz display. I have one and would love to get it working properly. So far I've only been able to get a couple of segments lit, but no further.
I remember when I got my first clone IBM-compatible PC. It was (I think) a twin floppy system so I was quite keen to get a hard drive but couldn't raise the cash. Then I found a hard drive similar to your one, but possibly a 5MB? - in a cupboard at work. I asked about it and was told it was junk. It had been pulled from a machine as it had started throwing out loads of errors - read/write errors, bad sectors etc. I asked if I could have it, to see if I could do anything with it, and was told "Go ahead, it's going to be thrown out at some point anyway". Sp I took it home and installed it (don't remember how or when I got the controller) and ran a low-level format, which was IIRC an address call to the MFM controller (D300 address comes to mind). Sure enough, loads of errors. After a bit of messing around and not getting anywhere, I was running out of ideas. Then I noticed the tab connector on the back of the platter housing (yours has the same). I thought "that looks like an earth tab", so I ran a wire from it to the case (I think I used one of the power supply screws). I fired it up and ran the LLF again. Bingo! No more problems. That drive ran perfectly for quite a while, until I upgraded to a larger capacity IDE drive.
Not that long ago I picked up an NEC APCIV that had an ST-506 in it. I was amazed it worked. I played with it a little bit, but I replaced it (and its controller) with IDE components. I use it to run XENIX now. What was surprising, I found a sticker that says some computer store resold it about 1995 and by 1995 a computer with one 5.25: disk drive and a 10MB HDD was pretty obsolete.
I've just recently got into your channel (binge watching intensifies)... All I can say is keep up the good work!! You make everything really entertaining. (Even though I am not familiar with some of the technology since I only got into computers in 2005)
BTW if I recall, those MFM hard drives parked their own heads on power-down. Mine did, anyway, so I don’t think manually parking the heads was an issue by then. Though I still manually parked the heads each time anyway.
I wonder if there is a RLL controller you can upgrade the hdd too. That brings back memories of have a Seagate hard drive. Back in the day, I had a full height hard drive that once I put the RLL controller in, got me 112mb.. if I remember correctly.. I could scramble an egg on it (Hot).
I have a later revision that shipped with the half height rarer RLL capable 33MB ST-238R variant, but only hooked up to an MFM controller, so only 21MB usable in reality. It was common to run these in MFM only as the 238R is really a 225 with the best heads... Supposedly. RLL had a lot of failure issues, so they chucked them in as 225s because of stock overflow. I keep debating getting an RLL controller card, but they're so rare, and my feeling is it might stress the poor old HDD to breaking.
I have a am386SX board that was dealt a fatal blow by a varta battery. Managed to resurrect the board but the ROM of the included video card appears to be corrupted, that or something else is wrong with the motherboard.
I got a 5162 from eBay a couple of years ago, probably paid way too much for it. The HDD had failed as had a couple of others I bought from eBay but I eventually got an XT IDE card and I use it with a Kingspec IDE SSD. I also added a VGA card so I could use it with a modern monitor (I had no original IBM monitor). I also replaced the PSU fan with a new blue LED fan which actually serves two purposes. 1) It allows the system to power on without an MFM HDD and 2) makes my IBM XT 286 almost completely quiet.
I had a 5160 drive (without the 5160) and it was black which I think was a WD drive. I put it in my Compaq Portable and it would overheat the PSU and die unless I put a fan on it, so I added in a 120MM auxiliary fan on the outside of it and that seemed to fix it.
The 5160 was my first computer, all the way back in 1988/89. I have fond memories of the entire thing sounding like a turbine, and the *CLUNK* of the power switch. Still have no love for the Model F keyboard though. The one we had was pimped out with 20MB drive and ran CP/M for the first half a year or so until we got DOS for it.
I'd use a Netware 3.12 Server Built as a virtual machine on my laptop, and a ethernet adapter with a boot disk, but I am an old Master CNE from that era.
I'm probably a bit late to the party, but 5V over 38ohm only equals about 131mA of current, so that's pretty far off a dead short and not a huge amount of load on the power supply (0.65W roughly). It may seem like quite a big drop from 200ohm, but I believe each of those little capacitors probably contributes a little bit of resistance between 5V and GND, plus any other components that do the same. All of that in parallel is going to present a lowish resistance value but doesn't necessarily represent a problem.
any chance of you doing a video of the cables that you got connected from the monitor to the main unit please, because i've got a ibm 5160 with cga monitor and would like to know what cables i need to connected?
That was one of my first computers I built! I didn't have the hard drive to start with but picked it up later. It developed a "sticktion" problem where I had to reach underneath and start it spinning. Good times :)
Those Xebec MFM controller cards, while very reliable, are also very slow. They basically used the cheapest controller they could find. Even WD's first offering for the IBM PC was faster. I would put a small heatsink on that 8087. Those things run quite hot and mine runs hot enough that you can actually smell it. It made my mother extremely nervous every time I ran the thing until I put on the heatsink. I attached mine with silicone thermal adhesive and made a small shim so I could offset the heatsink slightly as to not cover the label on the package.
That dark smoked plastic cover for the front of the console looks like a holdover from the 1970's. It was my understanding that these drives need to have the PARK command invoked every time a session is ended and is powered down.
For your MDA Adapter: Try getting the switch settings on the back exactly as your second one and reseat the controller chip and the character ROM IC. These could have gotten a loose connection while shipping which happens. For your Backup: I think the most stressless way would be using something in the realm of laplink. This should work on the XT. One other thing you could try is a ZIP Drive although I am not certain if the driver would work on the machine or if it would need some newer processor. BTW: Have you already heard of the graphics converter using a PI Zero? I think this should work with MDA and CGA as well and uses rahter cheap parts to output to HDMI.
Microcomputers were introduced here in the Philippines during the '90s. 286, one color display. 386 one color display , 486 in color display, then Pentium 1 arrived. But during the '80s, there are Commodore 64 but very rare, and can only be afforded by rich people.
Per Y2K Compliance, I have an AST ComboPlus (Or some other AST card) in my 5160 and PC-DOS 5 or 6 (I forget which) and it is indeed Y2K compliant. So I think it would depend mostly on the capabilities of the RTC card you're using. If you do decide to replace the battery, it might be worth putting in a battery holder so you can swap out a battery and avoid leakage in the future. Unfortunately, the hard drive in my 5160 has not survived. So I have mine running on a Lo-Tech XT-IDE with a 2GB SanDisk Ultra CF with the HDD LED connected to the XT-IDE card. It's worked perfectly without issue. So it can definitely be done.
It seemed kind of fatalist to assume that a product named 'XT-IDE' would not work in an actual XT no matter what media you were using. Glad you've been able to figure out a backup option anyway.
I'm having a hard time dealing with only a 160MB HDD in a 386DX-20 IBM PS2 I have. 10MB is at least enough for DOS 3.21 I guess so that's nice. My Turbo XT I grew up with didn't have a hard drive at all. I swapped 5.25" disks for 10 years so I wouldn't complain.
20:55 "Tape to disk" is there to save the "virtual calculator tape" to the floppy or hard disk. Obviously this PC was used by someone doing bookkeeping or something similar.
I usually use a null-modem cable with interlink / intersvr, since I don't have modern interfaces like xt-cf, I transfer the data to a 486 and from there I copy them to a pentium III. it's slow and laborious but it works :)
I had a 3270 PC (basically an XT) with the same ST-412 10MB hard drive and it also still worked perfectly fine. In my experience, the 10MB HDD's are more reliable than the later 20 and 30MB HDD's.
As a kid we used to play hard drive bowling -- full height 5.25" drives were the best. Spin it up, roll it down the driveway, and watch it dance. Fun memories but I feel bad killing so much equipment that would be lusted after today.
Hello! Enjoyed your videos! I was wondering if I could ask you a tech question on the power supply for those original IBM 5100 series computers. I have a MEGA 4000 power supply that is putting out +/-21V instead of the +/-12V that should be coming out. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
My first computer after my beloved zx spectrum was a tandon 286 with 1mb ram and 20mb hdd with a 5 1/4 floppy. bought it for 80 GBP and at some point the VDU stopped working so i actually found a repair shop that fixed it for 30 GBP, the state of the art at the time was 486 just before the first pentiums were rolling of the production line. I used to download games at college, copy them to floppy and take them home. I became very comfortable with QBASIC. I loved those old games, one chess program i really liked and enjoyed bunch of platform games and some really old top down RPGs. I used to actually prefer wordperfect to MS word. happy days
That front cover is awesome. As for archiving the HDD, if you do find a way; please post it up. I too have a 5160 with a full HDD and with 30+ year old research data on it, that I’d hate to loose.
21:42 I doubt it, too. Thank goodness that caused no harm on what is, even factoring that out, a miraculously working hard drive, as ridiculously old as it is.
I just picked one up for $10 the other day, just needs a keyboard! You should get an ATI Small Wonder or EGA Wonder, you can display cga or ega graphics on the mono monitor or pretty much any monitor you want to use
The MDA doesn't have graphics mode, i.e. it can't address every single pixel. It's just text only. If the card's RAM would be defective, you would have a garbled screen, but with readable characters. It more likely has a problem addressing the character ROM. The CRT controller (MC6845) works, otherwise you wouldn't get a picture at all. My guess is either a broken character ROM, or one or more defective logic gates on the card. Since the machine detects a video card error during POST (1 long, two short beeps), I would guess the latter.
@@DEMENTO01 I've had that on some cards, might be from being wave soldered on only one side ad the resulting thermal expansion, or maybe from not being inserted correctly into the guiding slot on the front of the case and then being stored sideways for decades... But since it's all through-hole components it shouldn't really matter a lot. I even have a Panasonic Sr. Partner (XT class portable PC with built-in printer) where someone tried to install a memory expansion card. The machine is too short to install a full-length card, so he just broke off the PCB before the last row of RAM sockets on the card and soldered a wire to reattach the ground traces from top to bottom. Looks creepy but actually works, resulting in an odd 448k of RAM instead of 512... Those old ISA cards are usually quite tough. I have to re-watch the video, maybe the card was right next to the RAM-card's battery. I often had problems with 74xx chips being damaged by vapors emitted off leaky batteries, they seem to creep into the chip's casing where the pins go in and cause havoc inside.
I have a similar video problem on my AST 286 laptop, looked up the BIOS codes and it appears to be a video RAM failure, which makes sense due to the random and garbled characters on the screen.
Did you ever get around to replacing that video card? My first PC was 5150, similarly specced when I first got it. Before I got a Hercules card I remember entertaining myself with the likes of Rogue, and Kingdom of Kroz, along with the usual text adventures. One thing that 8087 will help with is anything that you write with QuickBASIC that uses floating point arithmetic. I remember writing a cute little MDA fireworks demo where my 8088/8087 put the 286s at college to shame.
I work in a computer repair shop and we just got one of these in. What would cause a corrupted character set on it? DOS appears to work, it's just the characters are not what they're supposed to be. Would that be a corrupted BIOS by chance?
I'm pretty sure it would be the display adapter. It generates the video characters by reading what is it the memory range for text. If you can replace that it will likely work.
Very nice, as an owner of an xt motherboard i'd like to get mine to work as well, i am missing a keyboard or an adapter for it and i have some memory problems in my board (post stops counting ram at 64k no matter which switches settings or ram chips i used or either which socketed ics i used) but some times it works giving me the error 301 and then it stops at "error. (resume = "F1" key)", so probably with a keyboard i can get it to boot sometimes, but i think that some ram related chips is bad. The xt is my favorite 8088 machine. it has all the good things of the 5150 and improoves it in every way, if i could get mine working i will enjoy gaming and programming on it a lot, i am waiting that the guy from monotech finalizes his deign for an all in one xt upgrade card and then i will order that and built a sound blaster 1.0 replica for myself.
Just so you know, it is possible to make the XT-IDE coexist with the MFM controller :) it's not really a widely known trick however (many people prefer to rip out the original hard drive and controller) Also be careful about the slot 8 of the PC/XT! Only special ISA cards can work in it (such as the IBM Expansion chassis card, the Microsoft InPort mouse bus card which has a slot 8 jumper...)
you can go EGA, just buy an adapter board and put in a VGA monitor, these adapter boards are easy to find now (but not that cheap). I use such an adapter on a Zenith Data systems 8088, I use it everyday with wordperfect 4.2, to hide from multitasking modern PC when I need to be efficient at writing.
The low resistance on those disk controllers is most likely just caused by the (passive) termination networks. Those are 330/220 ohm voltage dividers, so 550Ohms each. A few of them in parallel and you get these values easily. Also those caps in between of the RAM chips on the memory expansion are 100nF ceramics (they are marked "104", too). They DO short in rare circumstances, but are much more reliable than old tantalums.
don´t worry much about the HDD, it sounds good to me, if it hadn´t been overheated, which i doubt, it will be good to go for several years(!!) to come.... The main problems on HDDs is the spindle motor, if that lubric is bad, it usually sounds like a jet engine, as the bearings had worned out....if it´s as silent as yours is, it´s a very happy drive...i´ve some old MFM/RLL drives (ST225s) which are still working fine, but ok they don´t need to spin all day long for eight hours straight, like in the old days..But from time ti time i still operate them with no problems. Of course it´s always a good idea to do a backup, as these drives doesn´t hold much data, from todays point of view ;)
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Dude I’m 57 years old and my first job right out of college was at a company that sold these computers in my country. You have no idea how many of these things I put together, upgraded, and installed. People looked at you like you came from outer space. Ohhh the memories. Of course these were extremely expensive back then (early 80s) so I used a Franklin ACE1000 for school work. I still have it too. Anyhow, I ended up moving to Miami and my first computer here was the IBM PC 5160. Got it as a gift from my boss; it came from a mechanic shop and it was covered in grime. Cleaned it all up, and it looked brand spanking new. I later replaced the motherboard for one the used a Z80 processor, can’t remember the name of it. I think I ended up giving it to GoodWill. Man we’ve come a loooooong way. 😅
Since this video I was able to archive the contents of the MFM drive by putting the original controller in my 5150 with the CF-IDE adapter and copying the files to the CF card in there. I would still like to hear how other people do it though. Especially putting an MFM drive like this in an AT class computer like a 486 which is easier to do archival work with.
I also noticed a mistake where I misinterpreted the size of the files in a directory as the remaining disk space available towards the end. Opps.
AkBKukU
You are chucking a lot of videos out l love it thank you
Please archive that ROM as well ... I acquired a Xebec 1220 controller a while ago that was apparently shipped in some 5160 machines. One of the 4 jumperable HDD types actually supports 10mb at most.
The serial connector seemed interesting. Otherwise TelNet?
Do you mean the 5160 BIOS ROM or the one on the MFM controller? I'm guessing MFM. That MFM controller seems uncommon so I should probably do that sooner than later.
A friend of mine got a Toshiba T3100e which was used for controlling a machine in a printing house. He asked me to install MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 some (roughly) period correct software and games on it, etc. I used a null modem cable and Total Commander's serial plugin so I could move data between the T3100e and one of my Dell Latitude laptops I had at the time (ran Windows 7) and it worked out fine. Sometimes I was getting timeout errors because of the lousy USB to serial adapter cable, but it wasn't that bad. Not the best picture of the setup, but that's the only I have: ibb.co/tLHhRKq
The seller said ready to go out the box but they never said what box.
MFM drives were actually quite resilient providing you remembered to park the heads after each work session.
That video card is bent, I don't think it's a faulty chip.
Also if you go on collecting more IBM machines remember that beep code (one long - pause - 2 short), it's the standard "bad video card" warning.
There is Druaga's seal of approval in upper-left corner 0:41
Aslin Fire Safety I do hope you know what a HI POT test actually is :) as funny as the name is.
Perfect timing, love old IBMs computers
I remember using the park command on my old IBMs. They were old when I had them. I had a 10mb drive, and I think one with a 20mb drive, both the full height and a half height. It would be kind of neat to still have had them around, but they have been gone for decades now along with an IBM Portable. It is cool to see some of them still operating and people enjoying working with them though.
I'm impressed! have even the plastic protection that is too rare!
Wow, this was my first “real” computer, that I got in 1994 with a 2400 baud modem, monochrome display, 20 MB MFM hard drive, and 640K expansion board with real-time clock. Got onto the internet (via shell account) and dialed a lot of BBSs with that thing.
My previous computer was a TRS-80 Model 4, but all I had with it was VisiCalc and LeScript. No terminal emulation software so I couldn’t get an old 300 baud acoustic-coupled modem I found working with it. No games either, but I could write my own and it had a printer, at least.
Anyway I upgraded that old XT several times, adding a 10 MB IDE hardcard and Hercules display adapter. That allowed me to run Windows 3.0 which was incredibly slow, but got me Solitaire lol.
That old computer taught me a lot, and it jumpstarted my lucrative 25-year IT career despite being a three-time dropout with an eighth-grade education. With the right experience, education doesn’t matter in this industry, for which I’m grateful.
The original IBM MDA and CGA card both use the same ROM chip. So you can try swapping the ROM from either another MDA card or a CGA card onto the faulty MDA card to see if that fixes the problem.
You should put the MDA card in the 5150 and the cga card in the 5160. That's what I did with mine. Then ega card for at AT 5170 and VGA in a PS/2. It's cool to see the progression in the IBM PC line.
What is going on at the 17:02 timeline in the video?..the video card goes in front of the monitor and it gets magnified in a funny way?...
I magnified the monitor while editing so you could see the RAM check easier in the video.
it confused me for a sec as well lol
@@TechTangents yea i thought you were pulling some weird Quantum Technomancy there for a minute!
Good god man, where is this magical fountain of vintage computers you seem to have access to 😍
there's 5160s on ebay right now for under 40$ plus shipping
is the original videocard... bent?
Totally... YES
@Hexo2000 Those POST beeps - 1 long 2 short = Video (Mono/CGA display circuitry) issue...
It did look suspiciously like it wanted to be a banana. I suspect heat for the years this thing was in service warped the board. Not uncommon with those old giant cards. Also possible this computer was stored on its side for several years and that warped it.
That's why old PCs had those rails at the front of the chassis. A full length card would slide into one of those rails to prevent just that from occurring, though in this case it seems to have sagged in the middle instead. You'll notice that the monochrome card has the chips aligned perpendicular to the length of the board, where the other ones are aligned parallel to the board.
Sir, I believe that's my avatar!
1 Long beep, followed by 2 short beeps means there is a display issue. In your case I would guess that the switch block is configured incorrectly (is set for a card with a BIOS, EGA and beyond, but you're using one without a BIOS).
So the next question is how early a 5160 that is. I am guessing really early based on the fact that it has the earlier MDM controller card and XT-IDE problems.
I figured it was probably that but when it worked after I put in the other card I got side tracked by being amazed it booted. I'll get it corrected when I open it next.
Oddly, I remembered that code too. I said, "Display...it's the display..." without even thinking.
If you look at the 5160 HD Controller, it has its own Z80 processor on it.
For a fact the Professional Graphics Controller had literally its own 8088 CPU.. It's not surprising.
I like how methodical and detailed is this video about the xt pc. I had one gifted and sadly I broke it and disassemble. But I still wish for fix it with modern caveats.
@3:19 Man, those ST-225s were indestructible!!! Great machine, dude. I have a 5160 as well! The last time it worked was in the mid-2000s. It was in storage for a while, and when I tried to fire it up the other day, I got nothing :(
It's probably time to open it up and see if anything went since the last time it was turned on from the sounds of that.
@@rawr51919 Yeah, I took it apart and pulled each card one at a time to see if it made any difference, but nothing positive happened. The power supply works and the mighty full height hard drive still spins up, but I get no error beeps, no video, etc. I haven't done any in depth testing on it :/
I'm impressed with your expertise. I acquired an IBM PC XT many moons ago (20 years?) when my place of employment decided it was taking up too much storage space. So, I got it for free. Took it home, set it up and without the precautions you took here, turned it on. Presented with a system utterly unfamiliar to me, I then put it into storage with my mostly Commodore and other archaic consumer computers...where it has remained for all these years. Maybe I should check out what these machines bring on eBay, but I suspect not much. Likely a lot less than shipping costs, right?
I have one of these myself, but just the system unit. Same revision with the 10MB drive. I did upgrade the CPU to an NEC V20 and changed the drive to a 40MB ST-251 and WD controller. Had to use an 8-bit VGA so I could use a flat panel screen that is shared with my modern computers.
another difference between the 5150 and 5160 is the 5150 has a cassette tape port next to the keyboard, the 5160 doesn't (since they were never used, plus the extra expansion slots). Something thats usually overlooked.
4:50 - I really lucked out when building my 486 gaming DOS PC. Found both a CompatiCard & UniDOS card from MicroSolutions still in their boxes with diskettes and manuals at my local recycler (who've since shut down, unfortunately.) The CompatiCard lets you connect up to four drives and includes an external connector. They can be any combination of HD, DD, or SS in 3.5", 5.25", and even 8" drives with support for CP/M diskettes and drives with the accompanying UniDOS card. You can manually set the TPI for each drive using jumpers. You can set the card up as a primary controller (if no onboard controller) or as a secondary controller if you have onboard or a different controller card. Additionally, the card can also be set as tertiary and quaternary controller card with up to 4 CompatiCards installed simultaneously for up to 16 floppy drives, 18 if you have an onboard controller. I'm sure there were some use-case scenarios for having so many floppy drives, especially in a university setting.
So my gaming PC has a 1.44MB 3.5", a 1.2MB 5.25", and a 360KB 5.25". I don't own an 8" drive, but it'd be fun to find one and play with those giant floppies. :D
Oh man, I still have on a closet one of those seagate MFM discs... When it starts and stops it sounds like a bus with faulty brakes xD
To increase the system speed, you can install a NEC V20 instead of the 8088.
Stefan Gies in this motherboard it will be not any increased performanse ,you have to be with Turbo XT ,just like if you put 8086 if the motherboard do not support 16 bit bus it will run like a 8088 with 8 bit bus
@@intel386DX You should have a look at Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20
The NEC V20 (μPD70108) was a processor made by NEC that was a reverse-engineered, pin-compatible version of the Intel 8088
Nice score... I picked up two 5160s last yr on a whim never owning one before. The 1st one was $100, and the reason I got it was because all the 8 slots were filed with cards and had one full sized floppy and two st-225 Hds and to my surprise when I checked out all the cards it had a MDA vid card and an EGA vid card in it along with a 286 accelerator card in slot 8, that was a 256K motherboard that has a six pack plus that was in it to round out the ram. The 2nd one was $50 from an e-waste recycler and that one had two half height floppies and one st-225 Hd and a CGA vid card plus it was a 640k board fully populated.
I put a XT-CF ECO-LITE XTIDE in the first 5160 and it booted perfectly fine, I guess I got lucky as both machines fired up fine with no electrical problems except I havent yet gotten any of the st-225s to access and the full sized tandon drive in the first machine didnt work until I watched your older video and soaked the stepper motor bearings with a little oil and it works fine except the heads are misaligned and it writes floppies only it can read. =/
I still have mine along with a few hdd, spare cards and mother boards. They buried deep in the garage.
Will they ever be worth anything? I'm probably going to downsize in a few years. The people that Used These machines will reach the end of their careers in the next 15 year's so there will be no emotional attachments to the hundreds of hours spent on these machines.
There is something so satisfying about the mechanical click of those keyboards.
Thanks for the video.
Very nostalgic.
There is an serial controller on that one? Use Norton Commander on it and another computer. It lets you transfer over serial. It’s not super quick but it’s just 10 MB so won’t take that long. :)
I still remember my first Norton Commander password, we had the "commercial" version.
Jay Converse Sadly I do not remember that well.
I wonder why the 2-drive "standard PC" floppy controller won out against the 4-drive Shugart controller. Tandy 1000's were using Shugarts all the way til the final RSX model, which could make installing replacement drives a bit intimidating for the uninitiated (usually just need to make a custom cable)
What a flashback to my youth. Thanks for the new (old?) memories!
Laplink or Brooklyn bridge with a null modem cable or laplink parallel cable will let you access the drive from another computer.
Alternatively, you can get a NE2000 network card or parallel network card and copy it over the network
Finally, MS DOS backup utility will let you make a backup that you can restore to another computer.
Laplink would be the least messy. But I think you'd get a lot of utility out of a parallel network adapter.
Why are you surprised it still works? These things were a huge investment in their time and because of that they had a supreme standard for quality.
These 10MB full-height drives are incredibly reliable, but considering most of them had a 5-year component design life, it is truly incredible.
If you want, I have some MDA games, and they are not only text, but also action. Also to your question, you can use both disks together, XT ide and also Seagate ST-412. So you can pretty easily archive your ST drive to XT-ide.
Great video thanx! Looking forward to that separate video on the LED mhz display. I have one and would love to get it working properly. So far I've only been able to get a couple of segments lit, but no further.
EDIT: oops.. commented on the wrong video, was supposed to be in response to the 486 100 Dos video :-)
It's kind of amazing that you can fit 10 TERABYTES of disk space in the same physical space as 10 megabytes would take up 35 years ago.
I remember when I got my first clone IBM-compatible PC. It was (I think) a twin floppy system so I was quite keen to get a hard drive but couldn't raise the cash.
Then I found a hard drive similar to your one, but possibly a 5MB? - in a cupboard at work. I asked about it and was told it was junk. It had been pulled from a machine as it had started throwing out loads of errors - read/write errors, bad sectors etc.
I asked if I could have it, to see if I could do anything with it, and was told "Go ahead, it's going to be thrown out at some point anyway".
Sp I took it home and installed it (don't remember how or when I got the controller) and ran a low-level format, which was IIRC an address call to the MFM controller (D300 address comes to mind).
Sure enough, loads of errors. After a bit of messing around and not getting anywhere, I was running out of ideas. Then I noticed the tab connector on the back of the platter housing (yours has the same). I thought "that looks like an earth tab", so I ran a wire from it to the case (I think I used one of the power supply screws). I fired it up and ran the LLF again. Bingo! No more problems.
That drive ran perfectly for quite a while, until I upgraded to a larger capacity IDE drive.
Not that long ago I picked up an NEC APCIV that had an ST-506 in it. I was amazed it worked. I played with it a little bit, but I replaced it (and its controller) with IDE components. I use it to run XENIX now. What was surprising, I found a sticker that says some computer store resold it about 1995 and by 1995 a computer with one 5.25: disk drive and a 10MB HDD was pretty obsolete.
I've just recently got into your channel (binge watching intensifies)... All I can say is keep up the good work!! You make everything really entertaining.
(Even though I am not familiar with some of the technology since I only got into computers in 2005)
On the mem expansion, those smaller yellow caps are thin film, they probably will never go bad.
BTW if I recall, those MFM hard drives parked their own heads on power-down. Mine did, anyway, so I don’t think manually parking the heads was an issue by then. Though I still manually parked the heads each time anyway.
I wonder if there is a RLL controller you can upgrade the hdd too. That brings back memories of have a Seagate hard drive. Back in the day, I had a full height hard drive that once I put the RLL controller in, got me 112mb.. if I remember correctly.. I could scramble an egg on it (Hot).
I have a later revision that shipped with the half height rarer RLL capable 33MB ST-238R variant, but only hooked up to an MFM controller, so only 21MB usable in reality. It was common to run these in MFM only as the 238R is really a 225 with the best heads... Supposedly. RLL had a lot of failure issues, so they chucked them in as 225s because of stock overflow.
I keep debating getting an RLL controller card, but they're so rare, and my feeling is it might stress the poor old HDD to breaking.
Imagine the capacity of a modern hard drive of that size.
TEN PETABYTES? hahahaha
@ we were promised a petabyte hard drive in 2012, they being lazy
@@billy-waynejeffcoat4828 not really being lazy, SSDs just stole the scene 'cuz of faster read/write times
Rylan Gray the largest commercially available storage device is a 16TB SSD
But MFM's had MASSIVE rare earth magnets. I have butchered many just for the magnetics. The new drives only have tiny magnets.
I have a am386SX board that was dealt a fatal blow by a varta battery. Managed to resurrect the board but the ROM of the included video card appears to be corrupted, that or something else is wrong with the motherboard.
I got a 5162 from eBay a couple of years ago, probably paid way too much for it. The HDD had failed as had a couple of others I bought from eBay but I eventually got an XT IDE card and I use it with a Kingspec IDE SSD. I also added a VGA card so I could use it with a modern monitor (I had no original IBM monitor). I also replaced the PSU fan with a new blue LED fan which actually serves two purposes. 1) It allows the system to power on without an MFM HDD and 2) makes my IBM XT 286 almost completely quiet.
I had a 5160 drive (without the 5160) and it was black which I think was a WD drive. I put it in my Compaq Portable and it would overheat the PSU and die unless I put a fan on it, so I added in a 120MM auxiliary fan on the outside of it and that seemed to fix it.
The 5160 was my first computer, all the way back in 1988/89. I have fond memories of the entire thing sounding like a turbine, and the *CLUNK* of the power switch. Still have no love for the Model F keyboard though. The one we had was pimped out with 20MB drive and ran CP/M for the first half a year or so until we got DOS for it.
I'd use a Netware 3.12 Server Built as a virtual machine on my laptop, and a ethernet adapter with a boot disk, but I am an old Master CNE from that era.
I'm probably a bit late to the party, but 5V over 38ohm only equals about 131mA of current, so that's pretty far off a dead short and not a huge amount of load on the power supply (0.65W roughly).
It may seem like quite a big drop from 200ohm, but I believe each of those little capacitors probably contributes a little bit of resistance between 5V and GND, plus any other components that do the same. All of that in parallel is going to present a lowish resistance value but doesn't necessarily represent a problem.
any chance of you doing a video of the cables that you got connected from the monitor to the main unit please, because i've got a ibm 5160 with cga monitor and would like to know what cables i need to connected?
That was one of my first computers I built! I didn't have the hard drive to start with but picked it up later. It developed a "sticktion" problem where I had to reach underneath and start it spinning. Good times :)
Those Xebec MFM controller cards, while very reliable, are also very slow. They basically used the cheapest controller they could find. Even WD's first offering for the IBM PC was faster.
I would put a small heatsink on that 8087. Those things run quite hot and mine runs hot enough that you can actually smell it. It made my mother extremely nervous every time I ran the thing until I put on the heatsink. I attached mine with silicone thermal adhesive and made a small shim so I could offset the heatsink slightly as to not cover the label on the package.
He is more excited with his 10MB hard drive than many people do with their 10TB ones.
I had one of these when I was 8 years old, w/ the 10mb hard drive. Over the years I upgraded it to a pentium before I got a newer at case
@10:55 only the top row of caps are tantalum (rounded with printed line) the rest are monoblock.
I HAVE NEVER CLICKED A VIDEO SO FAST
That dark smoked plastic cover for the front of the console looks like a holdover from the 1970's. It was my understanding that these drives need to have the PARK command invoked every time a session is ended and is powered down.
Ok, today was the day I learned about the existence of the drive bays front cover for this computer.
Better to get rid of the varta now, before the jem'haadar show up.
For your MDA Adapter:
Try getting the switch settings on the back exactly as your second one and reseat the controller chip and the character ROM IC. These could have gotten a loose connection while shipping which happens.
For your Backup: I think the most stressless way would be using something in the realm of laplink. This should work on the XT. One other thing you could try is a ZIP Drive although I am not certain if the driver would work on the machine or if it would need some newer processor.
BTW: Have you already heard of the graphics converter using a PI Zero? I think this should work with MDA and CGA as well and uses rahter cheap parts to output to HDMI.
Microcomputers were introduced here in the Philippines during the '90s. 286, one color display. 386 one color display , 486 in color display, then Pentium 1 arrived. But during the '80s, there are Commodore 64 but very rare, and can only be afforded by rich people.
Per Y2K Compliance, I have an AST ComboPlus (Or some other AST card) in my 5160 and PC-DOS 5 or 6 (I forget which) and it is indeed Y2K compliant. So I think it would depend mostly on the capabilities of the RTC card you're using. If you do decide to replace the battery, it might be worth putting in a battery holder so you can swap out a battery and avoid leakage in the future.
Unfortunately, the hard drive in my 5160 has not survived. So I have mine running on a Lo-Tech XT-IDE with a 2GB SanDisk Ultra CF with the HDD LED connected to the XT-IDE card. It's worked perfectly without issue. So it can definitely be done.
not sure if you did this off camera but after removing the battery i'd recommend getting rid of any residual corrosive reside to avoid corrosion creep
It seemed kind of fatalist to assume that a product named 'XT-IDE' would not work in an actual XT no matter what media you were using. Glad you've been able to figure out a backup option anyway.
I'm having a hard time dealing with only a 160MB HDD in a 386DX-20 IBM PS2 I have. 10MB is at least enough for DOS 3.21 I guess so that's nice. My Turbo XT I grew up with didn't have a hard drive at all. I swapped 5.25" disks for 10 years so I wouldn't complain.
20:55 "Tape to disk" is there to save the "virtual calculator tape" to the floppy or hard disk. Obviously this PC was used by someone doing bookkeeping or something similar.
I usually use a null-modem cable with interlink / intersvr, since I don't have modern interfaces like xt-cf, I transfer the data to a 486 and from there I copy them to a pentium III. it's slow and laborious but it works :)
I had a 3270 PC (basically an XT) with the same ST-412 10MB hard drive and it also still worked perfectly fine. In my experience, the 10MB HDD's are more reliable than the later 20 and 30MB HDD's.
As a kid we used to play hard drive bowling -- full height 5.25" drives were the best. Spin it up, roll it down the driveway, and watch it dance. Fun memories but I feel bad killing so much equipment that would be lusted after today.
"They're all 1983 chips" *touches chip from 1982*
Hello! Enjoyed your videos! I was wondering if I could ask you a tech question on the power supply for those original IBM 5100 series computers. I have a MEGA 4000 power supply that is putting out +/-21V instead of the +/-12V that should be coming out. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
that hard drive is surprisingly quiet
My first computer after my beloved zx spectrum was a tandon 286 with 1mb ram and 20mb hdd with a 5 1/4 floppy. bought it for 80 GBP and at some point the VDU stopped working so i actually found a repair shop that fixed it for 30 GBP, the state of the art at the time was 486 just before the first pentiums were rolling of the production line. I used to download games at college, copy them to floppy and take them home. I became very comfortable with QBASIC. I loved those old games, one chess program i really liked and enjoyed bunch of platform games and some really old top down RPGs. I used to actually prefer wordperfect to MS word. happy days
just hearing you go "DUUUUUUUDE" made me happy lol
Plop in a SCSI card and back it up to a SCSI device and then to something more modern from there?
That front cover is awesome.
As for archiving the HDD, if you do find a way; please post it up. I too have a 5160 with a full HDD and with 30+ year old research data on it, that I’d hate to loose.
He moved the drive into a newer system with an MFM controller. It was afterwards, he commented above.
Mike Finney Yup. Saw that about 2 seconds after I hit send 😁
3:08 As I said before, please tell us the weight/dimensions etc... even in the metric system, we're not all Americans.
Thanks
the MDA is bend?
That Varta battery looks like PX-625 mercury batteries stacked together?
21:42 I doubt it, too. Thank goodness that caused no harm on what is, even factoring that out, a miraculously working hard drive, as ridiculously old as it is.
Dude, I remember having something like this in my pre-teen years when I didn't know the innards of a computer
27:16 It's not a proper bodge wire without hot snot. :(
I just picked one up for $10 the other day, just needs a keyboard! You should get an ATI Small Wonder or EGA Wonder, you can display cga or ega graphics on the mono monitor or pretty much any monitor you want to use
Could that weird problem at first be faulty Video RAM?
That'd be my guess.
yes
The MDA doesn't have graphics mode, i.e. it can't address every single pixel. It's just text only. If the card's RAM would be defective, you would have a garbled screen, but with readable characters. It more likely has a problem addressing the character ROM. The CRT controller (MC6845) works, otherwise you wouldn't get a picture at all. My guess is either a broken character ROM, or one or more defective logic gates on the card. Since the machine detects a video card error during POST (1 long, two short beeps), I would guess the latter.
@@kpanic23 Ok i had no idea at all thanks. Btw the card is totally bent or is just me?
@@DEMENTO01 I've had that on some cards, might be from being wave soldered on only one side ad the resulting thermal expansion, or maybe from not being inserted correctly into the guiding slot on the front of the case and then being stored sideways for decades... But since it's all through-hole components it shouldn't really matter a lot. I even have a Panasonic Sr. Partner (XT class portable PC with built-in printer) where someone tried to install a memory expansion card. The machine is too short to install a full-length card, so he just broke off the PCB before the last row of RAM sockets on the card and soldered a wire to reattach the ground traces from top to bottom. Looks creepy but actually works, resulting in an odd 448k of RAM instead of 512... Those old ISA cards are usually quite tough. I have to re-watch the video, maybe the card was right next to the RAM-card's battery. I often had problems with 74xx chips being damaged by vapors emitted off leaky batteries, they seem to creep into the chip's casing where the pins go in and cause havoc inside.
I have a similar video problem on my AST 286 laptop, looked up the BIOS codes and it appears to be a video RAM failure, which makes sense due to the random and garbled characters on the screen.
No close up shot of that menu screen?
Did you ever get around to replacing that video card? My first PC was 5150, similarly specced when I first got it. Before I got a Hercules card I remember entertaining myself with the likes of Rogue, and Kingdom of Kroz, along with the usual text adventures. One thing that 8087 will help with is anything that you write with QuickBASIC that uses floating point arithmetic. I remember writing a cute little MDA fireworks demo where my 8088/8087 put the 286s at college to shame.
I used to use Laplink with a parallel crossover cable.
I work in a computer repair shop and we just got one of these in. What would cause a corrupted character set on it? DOS appears to work, it's just the characters are not what they're supposed to be. Would that be a corrupted BIOS by chance?
I'm pretty sure it would be the display adapter. It generates the video characters by reading what is it the memory range for text. If you can replace that it will likely work.
@@TechTangents thanks. That's going to be very helpful.
How much did you pay for it? These go for a pretty penny on eBay, and CraigsList is pretty hit/miss as to what you'll find.
Very nice, as an owner of an xt motherboard i'd like to get mine to work as well, i am missing a keyboard or an adapter for it and i have some memory problems in my board (post stops counting ram at 64k no matter which switches settings or ram chips i used or either which socketed ics i used) but some times it works giving me the error 301 and then it stops at "error. (resume = "F1" key)", so probably with a keyboard i can get it to boot sometimes, but i think that some ram related chips is bad.
The xt is my favorite 8088 machine. it has all the good things of the 5150 and improoves it in every way, if i could get mine working i will enjoy gaming and programming on it a lot, i am waiting that the guy from monotech finalizes his deign for an all in one xt upgrade card and then i will order that and built a sound blaster 1.0 replica for myself.
Just so you know, it is possible to make the XT-IDE coexist with the MFM controller :) it's not really a widely known trick however (many people prefer to rip out the original hard drive and controller)
Also be careful about the slot 8 of the PC/XT! Only special ISA cards can work in it (such as the IBM Expansion chassis card, the Microsoft InPort mouse bus card which has a slot 8 jumper...)
you can go EGA, just buy an adapter board and put in a VGA monitor, these adapter boards are easy to find now (but not that cheap). I use such an adapter on a Zenith Data systems 8088, I use it everyday with wordperfect 4.2, to hide from multitasking modern PC when I need to be efficient at writing.
Pretty Good Upgrade, Pretty Good Computer. This is A really Great Video!!!!!!!!!!!!
The low resistance on those disk controllers is most likely just caused by the (passive) termination networks. Those are 330/220 ohm voltage dividers, so 550Ohms each. A few of them in parallel and you get these values easily.
Also those caps in between of the RAM chips on the memory expansion are 100nF ceramics (they are marked "104", too). They DO short in rare circumstances, but are much more reliable than old tantalums.
This pleases me. Thank you.
6:45 Forbidden Love
don´t worry much about the HDD, it sounds good to me, if it hadn´t been overheated, which i doubt, it will be good to go for several years(!!) to come....
The main problems on HDDs is the spindle motor, if that lubric is bad, it usually sounds like a jet engine, as the bearings had worned out....if it´s as silent as yours is, it´s a very happy drive...i´ve some old MFM/RLL drives (ST225s) which are still working fine, but ok they don´t need to spin all day long for eight hours straight, like in the old days..But from time ti time i still operate them with no problems.
Of course it´s always a good idea to do a backup, as these drives doesn´t hold much data, from todays point of view ;)
Such a video on arching these HDD's would be useful, I am in the same boat, plus a test platform that is not the IBM.
11:00 those aren't all tantalums. Only the first row is.
Also, MFM drives were matched to their controllers.