As a former hard drive tech and data recovery specialist this was a bit of an amusing tech gore show. A few tips and chronicling events as I saw them: 0. your actuator is sticking (always inspect the actuator assembly, take off the top magnet carefully) - if you hear any hard contact sounds in operation in modern IDE + drives that don't use a stepper motor actuated head, the drive is shitting bricks. :D 1. don't poke the drive in operation (ever) 2. no brute force ever 3. never disengage the heads from the platter without headcomb (happens at 7:07) - head on head contact usually breaks them 4. heads that made head-head or head-platter contact are 99% of the time damaged 5. platters that had heads contact them are 99% of the time damaged. 6. At 7:36 you can see the drive looking for it's alignment tracks to find the extremes of the disk platter, then it gets stuck on the bumpers - it's also not finding them and promptly collides with the center axis s the degraded bumpers are mostly gone too. 7. 7:59 the drive took a nasty permanent damage hit 8. over night the head was parked against the bumper and got stuck. 9. 9:12 the stuck head drive track alignment seek goes completely wild, head detracks and gets absolutely wrecked. 10. As you've noted, the drive actuators are natural rubber and will turn to glue (modern drives avoid this for good reason) 11. removing the actuator requires custom "headcombs" either 3d printed or purchased. - they hook into the spaces between the heads and then lock them in place so the head stack assembly can be entirely removed without damage. 12. there are also tools to remove the actuator top plate + magnet assembly safely. (It's basically a big magnetic stamp) 13. disassembling and keeping alignment of the platter stack is pain and suffering and the only way to really do it is with tape stuck along the edge of the platers (i use aluminium tape that's specially cut to the right height) - also you basically never have a reason to remove the platters unless the motor is seized and can't be freed up by other means (heating/lubrication). Either way you seem to have learned most of this through practical exploration
after point 9 I was able to hook it up, launch into pc-dos, launch windows. It had a copy of lotus 123 on it and I could load up spreadsheets. Chkdsk also ran .... unfortunately it was late and also didn’t capture any video any more :( letting it sit overnight was also not a good idea as you mention (but at that point I don’t think I already knew about these rubber bumpers)
Thx for the very detailed analysis ... I learned a lot during this process and just wanted to show what a novice would probably end up doing if he opened up a hard drive for the first time.
Didn't he need to remove the platters to get access to the goo stop? It looks like, with two more heads, this would have been a 250MB drive. Can't he flip the bad sides of the platters over and use the good sides? Would a low level format have got it working? Of course not to recover, but to start over? Couldn't you have used a single head and got 62MB out of it? There are software programs that CLAIM they do low level formats on IDE drives. It seems like I had a drive that had so many bad sectors and I partitioned it and got the bad sectors isolated into one half and just used the other half.
Great video nonetheless. Not everybody has the guts to publish their failures. I learned a lot by viewing it. Perhaps the next time a drive fails I attempt an repair rather than throwing it to the recycling.
@Andrew_koala In the context of this video, imperfect spoken English is all that's required. How about sticking to the subject of this video instead of riding your own hobbyhorse? With respect to your remarks, I am reminded of H. W. Fowler's "pride of knowledge" in his "Modern Engish Usage"; some humility would not go amiss.
Hi Davy. Great analysis and showing the deep inside of a HDD. I did not know about this rubber bumper issues. Thanks for sharing. Greetz from Austria 🇦🇹
@@RetroSpector78 lol, I like when this happen that two retro channels are watching the videos of the other at the same time. this happend recently to me also with Adrian. 😅👍🏻👍🏻
You need to remove the platters as a whole stack, all together. One way is to tape them together, using masking tape (painters tape) on the circumference of the stack. I learned this watching Louis Rossmann data recovery serivces
@@DrakkarCalethiel on a 127MB drive it's no wonder, but on multi-TB-drives it really is crazy. Someone with good measuring equipment should try to test for maximum platter torsion angle using the tape technique ;-)
@@DrakkarCalethiel some models don't care about offset. You can literally move the platters around, AFAIK you only need to adjust some firmware variables. But for most drives, keeping the orientation intact is the safest way to go.
What if you don't care about the data? Could you low-level format the drive to get the new alignment working? (edit: I posted this comment before he mentioned that in the video)
It's videos like these where we actually learn something. I would have never had the nerve to open a hard-drive because of that fear of dust particles; but it doing so you've taught me a lot about drives themselves. Now, for my next eBay purchase I'm going to buy a dust-free room!
What a coincidence! Last week I also failed to fix a 420MB Prodrive LPS. It also had the same issues with that disgusting rubber bumpers. I broke a screwdriver trying to unscrew it. :D
So the travel stop bumper turned to goo which allowed the head to crash into the inner spindle. This explains the head coil being broke loose. What a shame.
4 года назад+5
Ooooh boy, so a few things I know about hard drives. The arm only moves when the platter is at top speed because the heads float in a cushion of air, other than that if they touch the platter they damage the magnetic coating and the heads themselves, and that got even worse after you moved the arm out and the controller stopped the platter, essentially griding the heads against the disc to a halt, so even if after you unstuck it by marring the platter with the heads, your luck was that this is such an old hard drive that the tolerances are big and it managed to work, but each time the board tried to read the boot sector (outmost sector on the disc) that part was already phisically damaged (the "funny" sound you heard) and started eating at the heads together with all of the particles that were introduced when you opened it in a simple room (not a positive pressure, filtered, dust free enviroment). By the next day all of these factors took a toll and once the heads were damaged to a point where they don't send any data back, the controller goes into a loop where it tries to read the boot sector, doesn't get any data, reset, read, fail, reset. And that's how you get a click of death. But all of this was caused by the rubber stopper that rotted, stuck the arm in place, and when you unstuck it, let the heads touch the motor hub, ripping a head off. Even if the rubber stopper was fine, just the intervention alone that you did by opening it in a normal "dusty" room and letting the heads touch the platters, all of that which by luck didn't ruin it immediately, over the following days it would start to corrupt files, corrupting the OS and finally, going into a click of death. This tech is beyond me on how humans manage to build and mass manufacture such a presicion and delicate machine, just like swiss watches in complexity.
4 года назад
I once did this experiment xD. Opened a working hard drive, closed it and used it normally. It lasted 3 days.
Yeah. I think the idea is to open it up, see if you can get it running again and immediately try to recuperate as much data as you can and then trash it. But I didn’t really care about the data, just wanted to see what was wrong with it. And I wasn’t going to send it to a data recovery firm where they do have a clean room :)
4 года назад+2
@@RetroSpector78 I know this was a super boring comment 😂 But It's the truth
@ Unless it was a 240MB or lower capacity hard drive, i wonder if the experimental result of ruining a drive purely by air ingress is transferable. I mean the data density on this thing is lower than on a Zip/LS120 floppy. It might plausibly stand up to a lot more abuse. Crossing over mark of several gigabyte it does turn into insane precision machinery though for sure.
The head coil got damaged before, when you moved the head outwards with brute force. You moved it too far at 7:02 , so it was partially outside the platter (this was only possible due to the deteriorating bumper). The whole front part of the head was bent a bit outside and was touching the side of the platter, and then you did spin up the disk with the head still touching the outside of the platter. Just take a closer look at the footage. After this, it took just a while for it to completely get loose. Nontetheless, thank you for releasing this video! Takes a lot of courage to do so after such a failure. This video is now a documentary of many mistakes that might happen when fixing these drives and will hopefully help many others in fixing their drives in the future. After all, there is not a lot of content about actually fixing hard drives on youtube.
This was extremely interesting, i love videos like this. Yes you made lots of mistakes but we all do that the first time we try something. I love fixing things but sometimes it results in that thing ends up in the bin! Anyway, many thanks for sharing.
I did a few harddrive repairs in the old days. One of the tricks I did to make sure the platters would remain aligned was to apply very thin and not very sticky tape on the sides, even making light markings with a alcohol based marker on the sides would do. on low density drives like these.
I have a 40mb Quantum ProDrive that is supposed to be succeptible to the rubber deterioration. The eBayer that I purchased the New Old Stock HDD from sacraficed one to check that the rubber bumpers are in good condition. How is it that some bumpers are good, while others are deteriorated? Heat from storage? Heat or something else from usage? Humidity during storage? Inconsistent rubber formulations?
Is it possible to access the rubber mount from the underside of the drive body? It seems that would be the only way to access it without removing the platters.
Hey man, I'm new to the channel, and I wanted to thank you for the great videos. I very much appreciate your showing us both your successes and your not quite successes, because it really helps to give me a bit of confidence in my own work and helps me maybe not make the same mistakes, myself. Very informative and entertaining stuff!
What if you had an hard disk that has a scratch right across it's surface, including Sector 0, where the arm gets stuck? How would you copy / image the data off of the bad drive in such a case?
I wish I would've saw this video a couple months ago. The Quantum GoDrive series have the same problem. Your video is much more nicer looking than mine.
I have actually encountered a stuck head issue that stopped the platters from spinning up in my work and have successfully recovered 99% of data, but I was very aware of the delicate nature of the read/write heads.
@@molivil no, 100% not, I had 486 boards with the option and used it once or twice. Also, had disks equivalent to WDToolsmwhich had a LLF tool for a particular bland of HDD on
I can confirm this does NOT work. This was a piece of software intended to be used with MFM hard drives, which were common before IDE was introduced and did need to be low level formatted by the user. IDE drives are permanently low-level formatted at the factory, and attempting to low level format an IDE hard drive can ruin it. IDE drive manufacturers quickly implemented a fail-safe that causes the hard drive's control circuitry to either return an OK or ERROR message to the computer if the user attempts to low level format it, and prevent anything from actually being written to the drive.
I wonder if a temperature and/or humidity controlled environment could actually stop that degradation. Not that it would be feasible for most, but at least there could be a way to preserve some of these drives. Sometimes I wonder how long it will be until all these great old machines from the 80s and 90s will inevitably break down. A couple of decades, or maybe a hundred year? Either way, sooner or later they will fail, and it makes me really sad. I have an amazing "little" laptop from 1990, a 386SX NEC ProSpeed SX/20, and I hope to keep using it until I grow old (so for an other 50-ish years haha). It's actually on my channel, only shows a few seconds long beep error, but I have managed to fix it since then, and planning to do a video about it, running some games and benchmarks.
@@nickwallette6201 Well, I was proposing this idea for storage conditions, I think you are right, when it's actually running, I don't see any way to control temps.
I have a Quantum 2.5GB hard from 1996 on a Windows 95 system. The system was held in perfect condition, you cannot even find dust in the case. I used it till 2000 when I left for overseas. It was still held in the same condition until I returned few months back: the hard makes exact same sound as you showed. Was thinking to open the drive case and look inside but didn't. Next time I am back, I will use this video as a guide. Got some important 90s games on that drive😃
Weird, I've successfully done platter swaps on 32GB and 72GB IBM SCSI SCA drives without aligning the platters. I didn't use them long after (just to recover the data). Maybe they had some magic to deal with out of alignment platters?
I never attempted a hard drive repair, as do not have the correct tools or know enough so not interested in even trying. Thank you for making a video as I enjoy all of your videos. Take care and stay safe
I noticed some people already mentioned JIS screw heads and the platter alignment. But there's one more thing to note: the screws all need to be torqued to the correct torque. This is especially true for newer drives. There are videos on youtube, demonstrating how drives will refuse to work correctly or at all, if the screws (even the ones holding on the top cover) aren't torqued to spec.
Very informative video. It's the errors that we learn from. I will rate this video above other professional videos as they only show you what needs to be done in a certain fixed manner. But, they don't tell you about the issues and problems that can come out of it, leave alone dealing with them.
2:21 Those are the ATAPI (IDE) master select jumpers. On Quantum drives, the coding is as follows: DS = IDE master, SP = IDE slave, CS = Role determined by cable wiring. For single drives on their own cable, DS should be used. For newer 80 rail IDE cables, CS should always be used. Nice vid, and nice pointer about not needing a clean room for casual work! Until I saw this vid I thought merely exposing the platter to normal air would do it in! 😳😇 I have an old (And indestructible) 40MB Connor around here somewhere. Once I’ve securely wiped it, I might throw it on the bench for a play too! 😊
Nice! Well the bottom plate contains the servo tracks. If you had put the platters in the same order you could have been lucky in the way that it would at least initialize to track zero again. I used to work in a team designing the electronics of 14" MFM hard drives. What you're having was the next generation. BTW you still could low level format them. Oh yeah for the heads they should never be moved when loaded. You need a head loading tool to lift them up before moving them around. What broke off this one data head was the RW coil from its 2 magnetic poles which are a brittle ferrite material. Oh man your video brings memories back :)
Those jumpers are just the normal quantum ones for selecting master, slave, cable select. Just labeled with confusing letters. By the way never put a HDD with its PCB onto the metal case, I (almost) killed a quantum drive like that
An unorthodox way to advertise your new HDD data recovery/repair service! ;) Another interesting video, but I've always been of the opinion that once the lid comes off a hard drive, it's game over... man.
Perhaps, or you bought yourself just enough time to get the data you’re still interested in :) Although I think these older hard drives are a lot more resilient when it comes to opening them up. I can imagine they have much lower data density and can take a punch.
Amazing work and good hints at the end! I managed to fix a similar quantum drive by replacing the bumpers with hot glue. I used the ole sticky tape trick to keep the platters synchronized when taking them off and some packaging plastic to hold the heads apart. For me the brake didn't want to release unless the cover was on. For that one success I ruined a few hard drives though, do not do this if you're after precious data - professional data recovery companies can do better. The worst part is I had to try twice to get the hot glue amount right, but i was ecstatic when it worked xD.
Good to know, I have several Quantum hard drives. I also have a couple of Connors that all have a very different problem with a very similar symptom - A small permanent magnet holds the head in the parking position and slowly magnetizes the arm, so that the "connection" between the two is too hard to overcome by the voice coil. This one is easy to repair, just stick a small piece of sticky tape on the magnet. But I also encountered a few Connors where the plastic seal disintegrated into some kind of liquid (some disintegrated into goo, too). Btw. a few years ago, the unspeakable happened - a Seagate ST225 of mine lost two heads (lost meaning they don't read any data anymore). When I used it last (several years ago), it was working fine. It has not been moved in the meantime.
@@DanDishonored It's a reference to MRE review channel Steve1989MREinfo. He tends to open up ancient, ancient cans of food and, well ... They tend to hiss haha.
this means that these drives with deteriorating rubber bumpers area lost cause? I don't see a way to remove the platters without moving them out of alignment to clean those bumpers
Had the same sticky-bumper-problem with a Quantum 52AT. I also opened it up and put a thin slice of paper around the bumper and it stuck to it and helped the head to not get stuck on the bumper. For now it works. This "repair" was a few years ago and I frequently test this drive. But I'm realistic about the longevity of this fix. It for sure made me cautious about old Quantum drives so I never bought them off eBay after that. I also heard that later models had the 2nd bumper underneath the platters and that is like a death sentence for these drives unless you're an expert with a clean room who knows what he's doing. About the misalignment of the platters: You could put tape on the edges of the platters that locks their respective angle in place when taking them out. 3 or four stripes at 120° or 90° from each other should do the trick and you can use the tape to lift both platters from the spindle simultaneously. That's of course after you took out the head stack in a way that doesn't damage the heads ^^ Anyways, too bad ... These old Quantum drives were very solid performers back in the day and I really liked them. But because of these disintegrating bumpers I marked them off my list of collectibles.
Well at least it was trashed before you finished it off for good :) Old rubber turning to goo seems like it'll ensure basically anything that uses it in this critical way is doomed to fail. At least you got some neat super strong neodymium magnets out of it :)
Very good video. I do have a couple points that worked for me with some success over the years. Clean room environments are prohibitive for most everyone. However, take a clear plastic bag and place over the drive. tape the corners of the bag to the table to prevent slippage. open the bag as little as you can to place dedicated (for clean type projects) inside. using an xacto knife, cut the bottom side of the bag to expose the needed working area of the bag and proceed as needed. Also be sure to wear gloves. While manufactures insist that you cannot low level format IDE hard drives, actually it's more of a strong warning. You can but with the caveat that it is usually as successful as upgrading bios. Sometimes it works like a charm, and other times you have a collectors brick. When your back is against the wall with old tech and the warranty is long out of question, then all cards are on the table.
I had an IDE hard drive on the Amiga. This record got louder and louder and made unhealthy noises. One day it didn't want to turn any more and just clicked softly. Then I tortured this IDE disk with a SCSI tool. Scsi-Eject didn't produce any results, but I was able to turn the rotary motor on and off. After a few tries I managed to get the platter back to turning. I was able to mount the disk again for half an hour and thus still save data on another disk. The plate was definitely damaged and then completely failed.
Misery loves company, so I expected something horribly wrong to warm up my little corrupted soul! But, this was not horrible, you actually managed to fix it, though just for a day. FYI that still does not count as horrible. And you actually learned more stuff now. What the hell :D I can't live with myself!
Metal shavings from grabbing the magnet assembly with pliers probably didnt help either lol. One trick to try dislodge the heads without opening up is to bump the drive on the side at full spin with one of those rubber hammers. It worked for me once for a Quantum LPS.
Interesting video. It's always good to see people upload their mistakes rather than presenting a fake perspective where things only ever go well. My understand is that it's not really possible to "repair" the internals of a hard drive. Even professional data recovery services with things like clean rooms can get it to the point where you can copy the data off, but the drive will most likely still fail completely some time soon.
I have the 85MB version of this hard drive (it's just this drive with a different head stack and a single platter). Good news: I was able to un-stick the heads. Bad news: just about every other thing. The actuator really is getting stuck on black rubber goop; the HDA seal shrunk, so that's been compromised; the hard drive is a paperweight now. Very fortunate that when I got this hard drive, it worked, and the first thing I did was back up all the data.
Earlier this week I tried exactly the same. On my PS/1 Pro I had simply put a piece of foam between the actuator coil and the case, so it will stop just shy of the rubber bumper below the platter. This week I wanted to try it the "real way". I took a Quantum SCSI drive (Prodrive LPS 210MB) and opened it up. I carefully removed the upper magnet assembly and slid the head assembly from the platters. Then I tried to wrap some tape around the edge of the platters to try to keep them indexed to each other. I goofed up by not removing the plastic locking arm beforehand. So when I tried removing the platter stack, it got stuck on that plastic arm. While coaxing it out the aluminium spacer ring slipped off the center scratching the platters. So yeah, now the drive is a goner. I guess the best solution to this problem might be trying to 3D print a plastic insert that fits into the pocket of the casing behind the actuator coil and acts as a stop to keep the heads from touching the rubber bumper. Basically the same I did with my IBM's drive, but a bit more sturdy and durable. That foam I used (the ESD stuff you normally push ICs into) will eventually start to deteriorate itself and crumble inside the drive, so a solid stop might be a better idea.
In "old days" we learned, that a hard drive is doomed as soon as you open the cover lid (if you are not in a cleanroom).Dust gets inside and lands on the platters. As soon as the harddrive starts spinning again the heads start to rub that dust into the surface of the platters creating faulty sectors. There was a lot of dust on the platters a few minutes into this video. Has that change during the last years?
OK, the drive is lost but still this is a very formative video on how to try to fix a defective drive and might become handy for a lot of people who try to fix a defective vintage drive in a vintage system...well done
Oh, by the way... I saw a guy using tape on the outer edges of the platters in order to keep the aligment during removal. That could be helpful for someone attempting to repair a hard drive like you did (and me, too, with an MFM drive during the last couple of days - I don't have to worry about the alignment, though).
I just got an old MFM drive going. Now I'm having panic attacks bout rubber goo inside the drive! LOL. Lots of old rubber products turn to goo over time. The drive belts in audio equipment. Capstan wheels. Reel to reel tape. I have been moving away fro mechanical HD's. Been using the old CF cards. But there's something about mechanical stuff. I actually want to figure out how to make a nice clear cover or maybe enclosure for my MFM drive so people can see the parts moving inside. I was thinking maybe I could make my own little clean room out of a fish tank and gloves. Kinda like they use in virus labs. Lorne.
This is more of an autopsy than a repair, have you considered BlueSCSI? Took my external Atari hard drive lid off and got it going, had to move it to another room and another Atari it won't work now.
i Have an early ide stepper drive (20mb) that was stuck...very stuck...i used a needle nose plier to twist the top head a bit and i managed to unstick it without ripping the head off...i left some fingerprints wich i removed by spraying the entire drive with brake cleaner and blowing canned air to dry it (dries very fast and no residue) i never wiped the platters with anything...just brake cleaner and air....amazingly it worked and still does, reads all the data just fine, has the original dos 4 i believe and windows 2...its installed on a schneider 8088 computer....i also have a seagate ide drive (40mb st 157a) that had a broken steel band that connects the stepper to the head assembly...i replaced it with one from other drive and then i had lo low level format it and it worked...i have a 386 mainboard with those colourfull amibios that allows low level formatting drives directly from the bios setup screen...
These are notoriously hard to fix - I got a 105 Mb open to loosen the head (it was stuck because of the crappy rubber stopper) JUST enough to pull the data off it. Then it just outright failed. Great drives at the time, but they don't age well at all, unlike WD and (gasp!) Maxtor drives (prone to bad sectors though).
Nice ,and remember be in absolutely dustfree eviroment. Dont try fix hard drive. Just a piece of dust will ruin the hard drive. You ruin it just if opned it. we are talking of so small differents like 1000/1 mm. so if Your hard drive broke, send it to the factory or recycle it. Anyway a very good video. Thank You so much.
Wow, Quantum ProDrive 127mb... that was the hard drive of my very own first PC, in a Acer ChipUp 386xs 33mhz computer which had an upgradable CPU to maximum Intel 486 66mhz OverDrive... and that pc included a whopping 2mb of RAM! Oh the memories!
i just now realized i had a hard drive platter when i was a kid and i would use it like a frisbee. i always wondered what it was. to me it just looked like a cd made out of metal so i just thought it was a big washer or something
I find your work extremely interesting! I like Back in the days :-) Small note. It is not a good idea to replace the insulation tape as a bumper at the end, it should be put on first and then the shrink-wrap, so nothing can peel off.
Since the bottom side of the bottom platter is read only with the track spacing, it uses that as a grid for locating spaces on the disk. In theory even a high level format should work. So there should be no track information on the other platters. If you separate the platters, the data will be garbled, but able to be high-level formatted away. That's the theory anyway.
I'm so glad I've been replacing all my old hdds with CF cards. It's mostly just a matter of time before something breaks inside.. very interesting video, though! I do have a few dead hdds laying around that I might take a shot at after seeing this. It's also pretty fascinating to see the inner workings of the hdd. Makes me wonder if you could use those parts some cool DIY project :)
This. I had these exact drives failing on machines I owned in the late 90's. The Western Digital drives of this era were far better than the Quantum drives.
Every brand has had a bad line so I'm not surprised. I recall Maxtor having a REALLY bad line in the early 2000s - I'd build PCs for friends and family and they all started to fail after a year or so. Well within warranty but that didn't excuse all the lost data.
@@redavatar agreed. Had tons of issues with Maxtor drives as well. Seagate drive have always treated me fairly well, but I’ve had several go back over the years as well. Western Digital drives, while not perfect, have always been the most reliable in my experience.
@@redavatar It doesn't take much. There was a single, very prone to failure, model of the IBM Deskstar drive around 2001-02 time frame that had ridiculous failure rates. It was so bad they started calling them "Deathstars" Only one model of drive, but the publicity was so bad IBM left the market and sold their drive manufacturing business.
I remember that Deathstar period. I was working at a computer store then. We had this one guy that worked as a consultant or something, he always came in and asked for advice on what to buy. We pointed him to the Deskstar as one of our most reliable drives. And then it wasn’t. Oops. But hey, how would any of us have known?
I hope somebody HDD Designer , Engineer or Assembler make a video inspection like this. So we will get insight knowledge how HDD works and how to repair HDD
Having fixed a lot of hard drives I can tell you 2 things. The label that says "Do not expose to hard shock" and/or "Fragile, do not drop." relate to the heads and their nature. That head coil may have come off when you forced it past the parking latch due to the hard stop at the end of it's travel. Secondly, you're right about why it failed initially. The thing is, there are tools that will allow a low level format of an IDE drive. Acrontis I think used to make one all be it expensive and hard to acquire. There are free programs on the Linux side of things that work pretty well. Originally they were developed for UNIX but they still work in a command shell prompt. I can't remember what they were called but it should be easy to search for. They may even be on the internet way-back machine. Do some homework and due diligence and I'm pretty sure you'll find at least one that will work. Keep trying too. Remember, mistakes are how we learn. If we're lucky each mistake is an only child. The great thing is that success has a huge family to back it because it comes from all the mistakes we made in the process of getting there. This is good content. I hope you're able to continue to produce more in the future.
Those screws are JIS screws. If you look closely there is a little divet in the screw head to make them discernible from Phillips screws.
Did not know that ... thx !
Didn't know that either!
Did they use that type of screw in order to prevent inquisitive people from disassembling such devices?
@@CRSolarice no, its an industry standard in Japan, hence JIS. Its used on everything from electronics to cars and motorcycles
As a former hard drive tech and data recovery specialist this was a bit of an amusing tech gore show.
A few tips and chronicling events as I saw them:
0. your actuator is sticking (always inspect the actuator assembly, take off the top magnet carefully)
- if you hear any hard contact sounds in operation in modern IDE + drives that don't use a stepper motor actuated head, the drive is shitting bricks. :D
1. don't poke the drive in operation (ever)
2. no brute force ever
3. never disengage the heads from the platter without headcomb (happens at 7:07)
- head on head contact usually breaks them
4. heads that made head-head or head-platter contact are 99% of the time damaged
5. platters that had heads contact them are 99% of the time damaged.
6. At 7:36 you can see the drive looking for it's alignment tracks to find the extremes of the disk platter, then it gets stuck on the bumpers
- it's also not finding them and promptly collides with the center axis s the degraded bumpers are mostly gone too.
7. 7:59 the drive took a nasty permanent damage hit
8. over night the head was parked against the bumper and got stuck.
9. 9:12 the stuck head drive track alignment seek goes completely wild, head detracks and gets absolutely wrecked.
10. As you've noted, the drive actuators are natural rubber and will turn to glue (modern drives avoid this for good reason)
11. removing the actuator requires custom "headcombs" either 3d printed or purchased.
- they hook into the spaces between the heads and then lock them in place so the head stack assembly can be entirely removed without damage.
12. there are also tools to remove the actuator top plate + magnet assembly safely. (It's basically a big magnetic stamp)
13. disassembling and keeping alignment of the platter stack is pain and suffering and the only way to really do it is with tape stuck along the edge of the platers (i use aluminium tape that's specially cut to the right height)
- also you basically never have a reason to remove the platters unless the motor is seized and can't be freed up by other means (heating/lubrication).
Either way you seem to have learned most of this through practical exploration
Point 9 is the last moment before which this drive could have been recoverable (though pointless to do so).
after point 9 I was able to hook it up, launch into pc-dos, launch windows. It had a copy of lotus 123 on it and I could load up spreadsheets. Chkdsk also ran .... unfortunately it was late and also didn’t capture any video any more :( letting it sit overnight was also not a good idea as you mention (but at that point I don’t think I already knew about these rubber bumpers)
Thx for the very detailed analysis ... I learned a lot during this process and just wanted to show what a novice would probably end up doing if he opened up a hard drive for the first time.
Didn't he need to remove the platters to get access to the goo stop?
It looks like, with two more heads, this would have been a 250MB drive. Can't he flip the bad sides of the platters over and use the good sides? Would a low level format have got it working? Of course not to recover, but to start over? Couldn't you have used a single head and got 62MB out of it? There are software programs that CLAIM they do low level formats on IDE drives. It seems like I had a drive that had so many bad sectors and I partitioned it and got the bad sectors isolated into one half and just used the other half.
Great video nonetheless. Not everybody has the guts to publish their failures. I learned a lot by viewing it. Perhaps the next time a drive fails I attempt an repair rather than throwing it to the recycling.
No issues showing my failures ... lots more where that came from :)
Agreed!
@@RetroSpector78 Failure?
It doesn't matter.
Sharing the insights with the community is a noble act. Thank you very much:)
Subscribed!
@Andrew_koala In the context of this video, imperfect spoken English is all that's required. How about sticking to the subject of this video instead of riding your own hobbyhorse? With respect to your remarks, I am reminded of H. W. Fowler's "pride of knowledge" in his "Modern Engish Usage"; some humility would not go amiss.
@Andrew_koala WOW !
Hi Davy. Great analysis and showing the deep inside of a HDD. I did not know about this rubber bumper issues. Thanks for sharing. Greetz from Austria 🇦🇹
Thx ... watching your FPU video now :)
@@RetroSpector78 lol, I like when this happen that two retro channels are watching the videos of the other at the same time. this happend recently to me also with Adrian. 😅👍🏻👍🏻
You need to remove the platters as a whole stack, all together.
One way is to tape them together, using masking tape (painters tape) on the circumference of the stack.
I learned this watching Louis Rossmann data recovery serivces
Was going to comment the same. It blows my mind that some bloody mask8ng tape at the edges of the platters is enough to keep them aligned.
@@DrakkarCalethiel on a 127MB drive it's no wonder, but on multi-TB-drives it really is crazy. Someone with good measuring equipment should try to test for maximum platter torsion angle using the tape technique ;-)
@@dolphhandcreme Wonder what the maximum allowed offset is on modern drives. If at all, it can't be much.
@@DrakkarCalethiel some models don't care about offset. You can literally move the platters around, AFAIK you only need to adjust some firmware variables. But for most drives, keeping the orientation intact is the safest way to go.
What if you don't care about the data? Could you low-level format the drive to get the new alignment working? (edit: I posted this comment before he mentioned that in the video)
I've dismantled 100s of drives over the years and never found one with this issue! interesting find :)
Really I've disassembled dozens and seen this very often with old Quantum drives.
I appreciate the fact that you were still willing to post this video and admit your mistakes. I learned a huge amount from this. Thank you.
Leant a lot here. Another thing to remember is, electrical tape is no good for anything permanent. The glue turns to goo and the vinyl goes hard!
the reverse of tape & heat shrink - yes that tape will come free once it gets warm..the heat shrink Will keep in place.
It's videos like these where we actually learn something. I would have never had the nerve to open a hard-drive because of that fear of dust particles; but it doing so you've taught me a lot about drives themselves. Now, for my next eBay purchase I'm going to buy a dust-free room!
I love these kinds of videos! Very informative, at least it gives you peace of mind knowing that those rubber pieces were the real culprits.
What a coincidence! Last week I also failed to fix a 420MB Prodrive LPS. It also had the same issues with that disgusting rubber bumpers.
I broke a screwdriver trying to unscrew it. :D
Well now we know these are in fact JIS screws :)
Thank you for sharing your attempted repair and failures. I find I learn more from failures than from success, so these videos are just as valuable.
So the travel stop bumper turned to goo which allowed the head to crash into the inner spindle. This explains the head coil being broke loose. What a shame.
Ooooh boy, so a few things I know about hard drives.
The arm only moves when the platter is at top speed because the heads float in a cushion of air, other than that if they touch the platter they damage the magnetic coating and the heads themselves, and that got even worse after you moved the arm out and the controller stopped the platter, essentially griding the heads against the disc to a halt, so even if after you unstuck it by marring the platter with the heads, your luck was that this is such an old hard drive that the tolerances are big and it managed to work, but each time the board tried to read the boot sector (outmost sector on the disc) that part was already phisically damaged (the "funny" sound you heard) and started eating at the heads together with all of the particles that were introduced when you opened it in a simple room (not a positive pressure, filtered, dust free enviroment). By the next day all of these factors took a toll and once the heads were damaged to a point where they don't send any data back, the controller goes into a loop where it tries to read the boot sector, doesn't get any data, reset, read, fail, reset. And that's how you get a click of death.
But all of this was caused by the rubber stopper that rotted, stuck the arm in place, and when you unstuck it, let the heads touch the motor hub, ripping a head off. Even if the rubber stopper was fine, just the intervention alone that you did by opening it in a normal "dusty" room and letting the heads touch the platters, all of that which by luck didn't ruin it immediately, over the following days it would start to corrupt files, corrupting the OS and finally, going into a click of death. This tech is beyond me on how humans manage to build and mass manufacture such a presicion and delicate machine, just like swiss watches in complexity.
I once did this experiment xD. Opened a working hard drive, closed it and used it normally. It lasted 3 days.
Yeah. I think the idea is to open it up, see if you can get it running again and immediately try to recuperate as much data as you can and then trash it. But I didn’t really care about the data, just wanted to see what was wrong with it. And I wasn’t going to send it to a data recovery firm where they do have a clean room :)
@@RetroSpector78 I know this was a super boring comment 😂 But It's the truth
@ Unless it was a 240MB or lower capacity hard drive, i wonder if the experimental result of ruining a drive purely by air ingress is transferable. I mean the data density on this thing is lower than on a Zip/LS120 floppy. It might plausibly stand up to a lot more abuse. Crossing over mark of several gigabyte it does turn into insane precision machinery though for sure.
Your honesty in publishing this video will no doubt help somebody. Sometimes the best way to learn is by making mistakes!
Still a great video. Sharing ones learning experiences through their mistakes is a very valuable commodity. Thanks for sharing!
Agreed. A person who doesn't make mistakes is a person who isn't learning.
The head coil got damaged before, when you moved the head outwards with brute force. You moved it too far at 7:02 , so it was partially outside the platter (this was only possible due to the deteriorating bumper). The whole front part of the head was bent a bit outside and was touching the side of the platter, and then you did spin up the disk with the head still touching the outside of the platter. Just take a closer look at the footage. After this, it took just a while for it to completely get loose.
Nontetheless, thank you for releasing this video! Takes a lot of courage to do so after such a failure. This video is now a documentary of many mistakes that might happen when fixing these drives and will hopefully help many others in fixing their drives in the future. After all, there is not a lot of content about actually fixing hard drives on youtube.
I tried that once. I didn't even get as far as you did. Another awesome video! Thank you.
This was extremely interesting, i love videos like this. Yes you made lots of mistakes but we all do that the first time we try something. I love fixing things but sometimes it results in that thing ends up in the bin! Anyway, many thanks for sharing.
I did a few harddrive repairs in the old days.
One of the tricks I did to make sure the platters would remain aligned was to apply very thin and not very sticky tape on the sides, even making light markings with a alcohol based marker on the sides would do. on low density drives like these.
I have a 40mb Quantum ProDrive that is supposed to be succeptible to the rubber deterioration. The eBayer that I purchased the New Old Stock HDD from sacraficed one to check that the rubber bumpers are in good condition. How is it that some bumpers are good, while others are deteriorated? Heat from storage? Heat or something else from usage? Humidity during storage? Inconsistent rubber formulations?
Thank you for showing this!!!
You’re very welcome.
Is it possible to access the rubber mount from the underside of the drive body? It seems that would be the only way to access it without removing the platters.
Hey man, I'm new to the channel, and I wanted to thank you for the great videos. I very much appreciate your showing us both your successes and your not quite successes, because it really helps to give me a bit of confidence in my own work and helps me maybe not make the same mistakes, myself. Very informative and entertaining stuff!
Thx a lot man ! Appreciate the comment and you visiting the channel !
What if you had an hard disk that has a scratch right across it's surface, including Sector 0, where the arm gets stuck? How would you copy / image the data off of the bad drive in such a case?
i see you follow scott moulton! That pill popper head comb thing is his idea! Great work showing the ins and outs of hard drives. Awesome video!!!
This was really cool to watch. Not many people show when things go wrong. It's fascinating! Thanks for making this!
I wish I would've saw this video a couple months ago. The Quantum GoDrive series have the same problem. Your video is much more nicer looking than mine.
I have built up the bump stop successfully using shrink tubing in multiple layers in Hardcards on several occasions.
Thank you for sharing your experience!
Great video. I was looking for something like this because I have few broken HDD's. Thank You very much.
From CPU Galaxy to RetroSpector78 - Good times
Yeah he’s the best ! Lots of cool stuff over there ... must be impressive to see his collection.
I have actually encountered a stuck head issue that stopped the platters from spinning up in my work and have successfully recovered 99% of data, but I was very aware of the delicate nature of the read/write heads.
Super informative, thank you very much! Both thumbs up.
9:24 That’s got quite a decent little tune to it 😆
Basically this fix was as impossible as a brain surgery in the hobby basement. But it was absolutely worth watching the attempt. Thank you! ;-)
Mission accomplished :) it did run for a couple of hours :)
I had many old PCs with a section in the BIOS where you could Low Level Format the installed IDE drive?
Yeah, but apparently that doesn’t do anything as the IDE circuitry will prevent it from low level formatting. But looking for confirmation on that.
I thought the bios low level format option was there only in case you were using an MFM controller coupled with an MFM hard disk drive
@@molivil no, 100% not, I had 486 boards with the option and used it once or twice. Also, had disks equivalent to WDToolsmwhich had a LLF tool for a particular bland of HDD on
@@gmcmaster1985 I see. In my boards the feature low level formatted all my MFM drives with most of my MFM controllers that I tested.
I can confirm this does NOT work. This was a piece of software intended to be used with MFM hard drives, which were common before IDE was introduced and did need to be low level formatted by the user. IDE drives are permanently low-level formatted at the factory, and attempting to low level format an IDE hard drive can ruin it. IDE drive manufacturers quickly implemented a fail-safe that causes the hard drive's control circuitry to either return an OK or ERROR message to the computer if the user attempts to low level format it, and prevent anything from actually being written to the drive.
Man those rubber bumper are a bummer, means my collection has an expiry date
I wonder if a temperature and/or humidity controlled environment could actually stop that degradation. Not that it would be feasible for most, but at least there could be a way to preserve some of these drives.
Sometimes I wonder how long it will be until all these great old machines from the 80s and 90s will inevitably break down. A couple of decades, or maybe a hundred year? Either way, sooner or later they will fail, and it makes me really sad.
I have an amazing "little" laptop from 1990, a 386SX NEC ProSpeed SX/20, and I hope to keep using it until I grow old (so for an other 50-ish years haha). It's actually on my channel, only shows a few seconds long beep error, but I have managed to fix it since then, and planning to do a video about it, running some games and benchmarks.
Nice thought, but ... how do you plan to keep the temperature constant inside of a working mechanical device? :-)
@@nickwallette6201 Well, I was proposing this idea for storage conditions, I think you are right, when it's actually running, I don't see any way to control temps.
All mine already expired. Same exact way. Down to WD and Maxtors now.
Only Quantums I have are >20 GB.
That was HARDwork ;)
I have a Quantum 2.5GB hard from 1996 on a Windows 95 system. The system was held in perfect condition, you cannot even find dust in the case. I used it till 2000 when I left for overseas. It was still held in the same condition until I returned few months back: the hard makes exact same sound as you showed. Was thinking to open the drive case and look inside but didn't. Next time I am back, I will use this video as a guide.
Got some important 90s games on that drive😃
Weird, I've successfully done platter swaps on 32GB and 72GB IBM SCSI SCA drives without aligning the platters. I didn't use them long after (just to recover the data). Maybe they had some magic to deal with out of alignment platters?
I never attempted a hard drive repair, as do not have the correct tools or know enough so not interested in even trying. Thank you for making a video as I enjoy all of your videos.
Take care and stay safe
Thx a lot ! Also don't have the correct tools and it is extremely difficult to do.
I noticed some people already mentioned JIS screw heads and the platter alignment. But there's one more thing to note: the screws all need to be torqued to the correct torque. This is especially true for newer drives. There are videos on youtube, demonstrating how drives will refuse to work correctly or at all, if the screws (even the ones holding on the top cover) aren't torqued to spec.
Very informative video. It's the errors that we learn from. I will rate this video above other professional videos as they only show you what needs to be done in a certain fixed manner. But, they don't tell you about the issues and problems that can come out of it, leave alone dealing with them.
2:21 Those are the ATAPI (IDE) master select jumpers. On Quantum drives, the coding is as follows:
DS = IDE master,
SP = IDE slave,
CS = Role determined by cable wiring.
For single drives on their own cable, DS should be used. For newer 80 rail IDE cables, CS should always be used.
Nice vid, and nice pointer about not needing a clean room for casual work! Until I saw this vid I thought merely exposing the platter to normal air would do it in! 😳😇
I have an old (And indestructible) 40MB Connor around here somewhere. Once I’ve securely wiped it, I might throw it on the bench for a play too! 😊
Nice! Well the bottom plate contains the servo tracks. If you had put the platters in the same order you could have been lucky in the way that it would at least initialize to track zero again. I used to work in a team designing the electronics of 14" MFM hard drives. What you're having was the next generation. BTW you still could low level format them. Oh yeah for the heads they should never be moved when loaded. You need a head loading tool to lift them up before moving them around. What broke off this one data head was the RW coil from its 2 magnetic poles which are a brittle ferrite material. Oh man your video brings memories back :)
suelo reparar los seagate 238 y 225, y tambien suelen soltarse los cabezales
see it positive:
the Magnets inside the Drive are AWESOME, very magnetic and great to keep your screws from rolling around.
Forget screws, they're good for hanging tools on!
@@retroretiree2086 Yes, they are very versatile and awesome!
Good to have some around somewhere!
Those jumpers are just the normal quantum ones for selecting master, slave, cable select. Just labeled with confusing letters. By the way never put a HDD with its PCB onto the metal case, I (almost) killed a quantum drive like that
An unorthodox way to advertise your new HDD data recovery/repair service! ;)
Another interesting video, but I've always been of the opinion that once the lid comes off a hard drive, it's game over... man.
Perhaps, or you bought yourself just enough time to get the data you’re still interested in :) Although I think these older hard drives are a lot more resilient when it comes to opening them up. I can imagine they have much lower data density and can take a punch.
Amazing work and good hints at the end! I managed to fix a similar quantum drive by replacing the bumpers with hot glue. I used the ole sticky tape trick to keep the platters synchronized when taking them off and some packaging plastic to hold the heads apart. For me the brake didn't want to release unless the cover was on. For that one success I ruined a few hard drives though, do not do this if you're after precious data - professional data recovery companies can do better. The worst part is I had to try twice to get the hot glue amount right, but i was ecstatic when it worked xD.
Good to know, I have several Quantum hard drives. I also have a couple of Connors that all have a very different problem with a very similar symptom - A small permanent magnet holds the head in the parking position and slowly magnetizes the arm, so that the "connection" between the two is too hard to overcome by the voice coil. This one is easy to repair, just stick a small piece of sticky tape on the magnet. But I also encountered a few Connors where the plastic seal disintegrated into some kind of liquid (some disintegrated into goo, too).
Btw. a few years ago, the unspeakable happened - a Seagate ST225 of mine lost two heads (lost meaning they don't read any data anymore). When I used it last (several years ago), it was working fine. It has not been moved in the meantime.
3:25 Anyone else expecting 'nice hiss'?
He should get it out on a tray...
@@dennisp.2147 nice!
I didn't. I opened many hard drives and it never did.
@@DanDishonored It's a reference to MRE review channel Steve1989MREinfo. He tends to open up ancient, ancient cans of food and, well ... They tend to hiss haha.
And then he arranges them on a tray and says, "nice".
this means that these drives with deteriorating rubber bumpers area lost cause? I don't see a way to remove the platters without moving them out of alignment to clean those bumpers
Acs data recovery has a video where they use sticky tape to hold them together.
Had the same sticky-bumper-problem with a Quantum 52AT. I also opened it up and put a thin slice of paper around the bumper and it stuck to it and helped the head to not get stuck on the bumper. For now it works. This "repair" was a few years ago and I frequently test this drive. But I'm realistic about the longevity of this fix. It for sure made me cautious about old Quantum drives so I never bought them off eBay after that. I also heard that later models had the 2nd bumper underneath the platters and that is like a death sentence for these drives unless you're an expert with a clean room who knows what he's doing. About the misalignment of the platters: You could put tape on the edges of the platters that locks their respective angle in place when taking them out. 3 or four stripes at 120° or 90° from each other should do the trick and you can use the tape to lift both platters from the spindle simultaneously. That's of course after you took out the head stack in a way that doesn't damage the heads ^^ Anyways, too bad ... These old Quantum drives were very solid performers back in the day and I really liked them. But because of these disintegrating bumpers I marked them off my list of collectibles.
Excellent! Very interesting post mortem analysis. Thanks for the video!
Well at least it was trashed before you finished it off for good :)
Old rubber turning to goo seems like it'll ensure basically anything that uses it in this critical way is doomed to fail. At least you got some neat super strong neodymium magnets out of it :)
How successful would it be opening a drive without a clean room anyway?
Very good video. I do have a couple points that worked for me with some success over the years. Clean room environments are prohibitive for most everyone. However, take a clear plastic bag and place over the drive. tape the corners of the bag to the table to prevent slippage. open the bag as little as you can to place dedicated (for clean type projects) inside. using an xacto knife, cut the bottom side of the bag to expose the needed working area of the bag and proceed as needed. Also be sure to wear gloves. While manufactures insist that you cannot low level format IDE hard drives, actually it's more of a strong warning. You can but with the caveat that it is usually as successful as upgrading bios. Sometimes it works like a charm, and other times you have a collectors brick. When your back is against the wall with old tech and the warranty is long out of question, then all cards are on the table.
I had an IDE hard drive on the Amiga. This record got louder and louder and made unhealthy noises. One day it didn't want to turn any more and just clicked softly. Then I tortured this IDE disk with a SCSI tool. Scsi-Eject didn't produce any results, but I was able to turn the rotary motor on and off. After a few tries I managed to get the platter back to turning. I was able to mount the disk again for half an hour and thus still save data on another disk. The plate was definitely damaged and then completely failed.
Thanks for sharing your learning experience so we can hopefully avoid the same traps!
Misery loves company, so I expected something horribly wrong to warm up my little corrupted soul! But, this was not horrible, you actually managed to fix it, though just for a day. FYI that still does not count as horrible. And you actually learned more stuff now. What the hell :D I can't live with myself!
Metal shavings from grabbing the magnet assembly with pliers probably didnt help either lol.
One trick to try dislodge the heads without opening up is to bump the drive on the side at full spin with one of those rubber hammers. It worked for me once for a Quantum LPS.
Interesting video. It's always good to see people upload their mistakes rather than presenting a fake perspective where things only ever go well.
My understand is that it's not really possible to "repair" the internals of a hard drive. Even professional data recovery services with things like clean rooms can get it to the point where you can copy the data off, but the drive will most likely still fail completely some time soon.
0:53 could you please let me know where did you buy this tweezers
I am not really sure. Could have been from adafruit.
And how it was done in the factory? I mean the process of low level formatting even if it called differently in IDE world.
This video was recommended to me right after I uploaded a video of a disastrous repair fail of my own.
You can tape edges of platters together :> It is as simple as that to get them off without rotating one to another
To keep the heads apart when disassembling, there are special combs to keep the heads apart which can be bought.
I have the 85MB version of this hard drive (it's just this drive with a different head stack and a single platter).
Good news: I was able to un-stick the heads. Bad news: just about every other thing. The actuator really is getting stuck on black rubber goop; the HDA seal shrunk, so that's been compromised; the hard drive is a paperweight now.
Very fortunate that when I got this hard drive, it worked, and the first thing I did was back up all the data.
Earlier this week I tried exactly the same.
On my PS/1 Pro I had simply put a piece of foam between the actuator coil and the case, so it will stop just shy of the rubber bumper below the platter.
This week I wanted to try it the "real way".
I took a Quantum SCSI drive (Prodrive LPS 210MB) and opened it up. I carefully removed the upper magnet assembly and slid the head assembly from the platters. Then I tried to wrap some tape around the edge of the platters to try to keep them indexed to each other.
I goofed up by not removing the plastic locking arm beforehand. So when I tried removing the platter stack, it got stuck on that plastic arm. While coaxing it out the aluminium spacer ring slipped off the center scratching the platters. So yeah, now the drive is a goner.
I guess the best solution to this problem might be trying to 3D print a plastic insert that fits into the pocket of the casing behind the actuator coil and acts as a stop to keep the heads from touching the rubber bumper. Basically the same I did with my IBM's drive, but a bit more sturdy and durable. That foam I used (the ESD stuff you normally push ICs into) will eventually start to deteriorate itself and crumble inside the drive, so a solid stop might be a better idea.
In "old days" we learned, that a hard drive is doomed as soon as you open the cover lid (if you are not in a cleanroom).Dust gets inside and lands on the platters. As soon as the harddrive starts spinning again the heads start to rub that dust into the surface of the platters creating faulty sectors. There was a lot of dust on the platters a few minutes into this video.
Has that change during the last years?
OK, the drive is lost but still this is a very formative video on how to try to fix a defective drive and might become handy for a lot of people who try to fix a defective vintage drive in a vintage system...well done
Oh, by the way... I saw a guy using tape on the outer edges of the platters in order to keep the aligment during removal. That could be helpful for someone attempting to repair a hard drive like you did (and me, too, with an MFM drive during the last couple of days - I don't have to worry about the alignment, though).
great video :)
By the way, any updates about videocard from hell or it's truly unfixable?
Cool video, i love fail vids, they are as educational as the explanitory ones!
Very good video! I respect the decision to publish it. Maybe repair is a miserable fail but at least we can learn a lot and laugh some! :D
Thank you very much for this video. I would surely make the same mistakes. But with these hints i will have a chance. :-)
Maxtor own(ed) quantum and I recall fairly early quantum ide hdd - 3.2gb etc being named “Quantum Fireball”.
I just got an old MFM drive going. Now I'm having panic attacks bout rubber goo inside the drive! LOL. Lots of old rubber products turn to goo over time. The drive belts in audio equipment. Capstan wheels. Reel to reel tape. I have been moving away fro mechanical HD's. Been using the old CF cards. But there's something about mechanical stuff. I actually want to figure out how to make a nice clear cover or maybe enclosure for my MFM drive so people can see the parts moving inside. I was thinking maybe I could make my own little clean room out of a fish tank and gloves. Kinda like they use in virus labs. Lorne.
This is more of an autopsy than a repair, have you considered BlueSCSI?
Took my external Atari hard drive lid off and got it going, had to move it to another room and another Atari it won't work now.
i Have an early ide stepper drive (20mb) that was stuck...very stuck...i used a needle nose plier to twist the top head a bit and i managed to unstick it without ripping the head off...i left some fingerprints wich i removed by spraying the entire drive with brake cleaner and blowing canned air to dry it (dries very fast and no residue) i never wiped the platters with anything...just brake cleaner and air....amazingly it worked and still does, reads all the data just fine, has the original dos 4 i believe and windows 2...its installed on a schneider 8088 computer....i also have a seagate ide drive (40mb st 157a) that had a broken steel band that connects the stepper to the head assembly...i replaced it with one from other drive and then i had lo low level format it and it worked...i have a 386 mainboard with those colourfull amibios that allows low level formatting drives directly from the bios setup screen...
These are notoriously hard to fix - I got a 105 Mb open to loosen the head (it was stuck because of the crappy rubber stopper) JUST enough to pull the data off it. Then it just outright failed.
Great drives at the time, but they don't age well at all, unlike WD and (gasp!) Maxtor drives (prone to bad sectors though).
Goodbye little drive. You were part of the micro revolution!
Failure? Sure. But was it interesting? Definately! Thank you :-)
I was in to it until he pull the drive and there was no cpu installed ???
Nice ,and remember be in absolutely dustfree eviroment. Dont try fix hard drive. Just a piece of dust will ruin the hard drive. You ruin it just if opned it. we are talking of so small differents like 1000/1 mm. so if Your hard drive broke, send it to the factory or recycle it. Anyway a very good video. Thank You so much.
Wow, Quantum ProDrive 127mb... that was the hard drive of my very own first PC, in a Acer ChipUp 386xs 33mhz computer which had an upgradable CPU to maximum Intel 486 66mhz OverDrive... and that pc included a whopping 2mb of RAM! Oh the memories!
i just now realized i had a hard drive platter when i was a kid and i would use it like a frisbee. i always wondered what it was. to me it just looked like a cd made out of metal so i just thought it was a big washer or something
I find your work extremely interesting! I like Back in the days :-)
Small note. It is not a good idea to replace the insulation tape as a bumper at the end, it should be put on first and then the shrink-wrap, so nothing can peel off.
Can't you just remove the platters and dump their content using an external reader? Or you wanted to preserve the HDD for authenticity?
Since the bottom side of the bottom platter is read only with the track spacing, it uses that as a grid for locating spaces on the disk. In theory even a high level format should work. So there should be no track information on the other platters. If you separate the platters, the data will be garbled, but able to be high-level formatted away. That's the theory anyway.
Another interesting watch, greetz from the coast...
These ProDrive ELS drives have a rubber bumper melting issue
I'm so glad I've been replacing all my old hdds with CF cards. It's mostly just a matter of time before something breaks inside.. very interesting video, though! I do have a few dead hdds laying around that I might take a shot at after seeing this. It's also pretty fascinating to see the inner workings of the hdd. Makes me wonder if you could use those parts some cool DIY project :)
Back in the day, I had more Quantum drives fail than ANY other brand. I'm almost certain they came with bad spots from the factory.
This. I had these exact drives failing on machines I owned in the late 90's. The Western Digital drives of this era were far better than the Quantum drives.
Every brand has had a bad line so I'm not surprised. I recall Maxtor having a REALLY bad line in the early 2000s - I'd build PCs for friends and family and they all started to fail after a year or so. Well within warranty but that didn't excuse all the lost data.
@@redavatar agreed. Had tons of issues with Maxtor drives as well. Seagate drive have always treated me fairly well, but I’ve had several go back over the years as well. Western Digital drives, while not perfect, have always been the most reliable in my experience.
@@redavatar It doesn't take much. There was a single, very prone to failure, model of the IBM Deskstar drive around 2001-02 time frame that had ridiculous failure rates. It was so bad they started calling them "Deathstars" Only one model of drive, but the publicity was so bad IBM left the market and sold their drive manufacturing business.
I remember that Deathstar period. I was working at a computer store then. We had this one guy that worked as a consultant or something, he always came in and asked for advice on what to buy. We pointed him to the Deskstar as one of our most reliable drives. And then it wasn’t. Oops. But hey, how would any of us have known?
"Let's just drop a screw on the platter and pick it up with my dirty fingers..." :-D lol
Attach a small magnet from the HDD to the screwdriver close to the head so that it can magnetise the screws
I hope somebody HDD Designer , Engineer or Assembler make a video inspection like this.
So we will get insight knowledge how HDD works and how to repair HDD
Having fixed a lot of hard drives I can tell you 2 things. The label that says "Do not expose to hard shock" and/or "Fragile, do not drop." relate to the heads and their nature. That head coil may have come off when you forced it past the parking latch due to the hard stop at the end of it's travel. Secondly, you're right about why it failed initially. The thing is, there are tools that will allow a low level format of an IDE drive. Acrontis I think used to make one all be it expensive and hard to acquire. There are free programs on the Linux side of things that work pretty well. Originally they were developed for UNIX but they still work in a command shell prompt. I can't remember what they were called but it should be easy to search for. They may even be on the internet way-back machine. Do some homework and due diligence and I'm pretty sure you'll find at least one that will work. Keep trying too. Remember, mistakes are how we learn. If we're lucky each mistake is an only child. The great thing is that success has a huge family to back it because it comes from all the mistakes we made in the process of getting there. This is good content. I hope you're able to continue to produce more in the future.