Quantum 80S drive not spinning
- Thread starter Retrotechie
- Start date
Usually its by the drive head getting stuck in perished rubber bumpers (which turns to goo getting the head stuck), you will have to open up the drive (in as clean and dust-free environment as possible - don't run it with the lid off like in some videos you see), see if the heads more freely and if not put tape over the rubber bumper.
See this video which refers to a later 3.5" Quantium SCSI HD, but the idea is the same:
See this video which refers to a later 3.5" Quantium SCSI HD, but the idea is the same:
It just sounds like stiction, in which case all you need to do is give it a bump while powered on.
I’ve tried bumping it with no success. I thought if the heads were stuck the drive would still spin up but maybe the heads are preventing the patter from moving somehow. I’ll open it and report back.
Google ‘stiction’ - the heads can be stuck to the surface of the platters preventing them from moving, which is different from the actuator being stuck to a sticky rubber bumper
Well I iopened up the drive and the platter was stuck pretty well. I don’t think it had to do with the heads, it was the spindle just gummed up. I freed it up which took some moving back and forth. I could feel a high friction spot in the rotation. I got it spinning and ran it a couple hours. Now it spins freely and starts every time.
The heads are another thing entirely. They always move and never appear stuck. They sometimes wander randomly in an oscillation pattern. Sometimes they work fine, You can tell when you power it on how it is going to be.
I did get the computer to boot off the drive twice and it worked perfectly. Once it works, it works great! The drive was last accessed in 1999. It has some fun sounds for startup, shutdown, etc. as well as a cool after dark screensaver and Word, Excel, and Quicken.
I’m not sure if this is the “goo” problem since the heads always move and the drive never spins down. I think for some reason on most power ups the drive loses the ability to control head position. I may try to image the drive just in case there is something good on it.
The heads are another thing entirely. They always move and never appear stuck. They sometimes wander randomly in an oscillation pattern. Sometimes they work fine, You can tell when you power it on how it is going to be.
I did get the computer to boot off the drive twice and it worked perfectly. Once it works, it works great! The drive was last accessed in 1999. It has some fun sounds for startup, shutdown, etc. as well as a cool after dark screensaver and Word, Excel, and Quicken.
I’m not sure if this is the “goo” problem since the heads always move and the drive never spins down. I think for some reason on most power ups the drive loses the ability to control head position. I may try to image the drive just in case there is something good on it.
Yeah I'd grab whatever data you can off it that you want to archive and consider the drive 'done'.
agree with @croissantking
when i encounter a drive with stiction like that I generally hook it up to a Zulu-Compatible SCSI emulator in Initiator mode, free the platter, and it starts imaging it right away.
then it goes into the scrap pile
when i encounter a drive with stiction like that I generally hook it up to a Zulu-Compatible SCSI emulator in Initiator mode, free the platter, and it starts imaging it right away.
then it goes into the scrap pile
I personally don't get the fascination a lot of people have with trying to keep these drives running (no critique if "that's your bag") as part of the whole vintage kit when solid state options are in abundance now, and I'd say I do the same as mentioned by fink, image with zulu/blue and then toss the drives - usually i just give them away in bulk at VCF swapmeets because again, some people really seem to want them to complete their systems!
lol yeah it’s not my bag, I just love learning and fixing old electronics. This SE/30 was a freebie, all yellow, sticky, and dead. Now it’s nice! I’ll use a Blue SCSI for sure. Right now I’m using an external one. The Mac came with an Ethernet card which I’m not sure what to do with? It takes up the back panel which makes an internal blue SCSI problematic.
I guess I’m trying to wake up! I have no Mac experience and don’t know what software I’d need to use the Ethernet. I have lots to learn, but it is fun.
Now you've freed up the heads/platters and it boots, it'll probably work OK until the next time you don't use it for six months. These older drives are much more tolerant than later models noting low density platters and higher tolerance of parts. Just don't save your one and only Bitcoin wallet to it and enjoy
Is the spindle bearing visible on the underside of the drive with the PCB removed? A drop of sewing machine oil might also assist.
Is the spindle bearing visible on the underside of the drive with the PCB removed? A drop of sewing machine oil might also assist.
Speaking only for myself personally as someone who grew up in the 5.25” floppy disk era, the sound of the drive is an integral part of the experience. Not just in a nostalgic sense; it’s an indication the computer is doing something even with nothing happening on screen. Back when computers were really slow, you needed this to know that something was actually going on. It was “thinking.” Sometimes loading a large CP/M program from floppy could take minutes. Though the computers got faster, this held true into the hard drive era. For me at least, it’s very disconcerting using a computer that is completely silent. When nothing has happened visually for an extended period of time, I don’t know if I’ve crashed or I need to go make a sandwich and come back later.
On the first point, I’ve spent almost zero time trying to keep old drives alive. All my hard drive capable machines have mechanicals in them, sometimes several, and when they die, they get replaced. In the last 20 years I’ve replaced fewer than 5 hard drives in a sample group of probably over three dozen machines. In my entire life I’ve only opened three failed hard drives. Two had nothing visibly wrong at all, they just wouldn’t spin up. The third the head had somehow broken off the armature and was flopping around freely, tethered only by its tiny cable. These experiences were enough for me to say, “Yeah, nothing I can do inside these things.” So it’s straight to the trash when they die.
I’ve found though that mechanical hard drives are a lot like cars. You need to run them regularly and they won’t give you trouble. It’s when they sit for almost 30 years, as in the OP’s case, that they tend to die.
