Connor Mac Portable 3045 40MB Drives

gkmaia · Jul 19, 2020

I do not have any goo on the head bumpers. But lots of white goo at the seal edges. The plate filter was soaked in good as well.

Is there any drawback in terms of alignment if I remove the plates? Would be good to take them out and clean the whole assembly and look under the plates.

What would you use to clean a plate? IPA alchool?

aplmak · Aug 29, 2020

I haven’t messed with the platters really.. a few times I used denatured alcohol or 90% rubbing alcohol to clean some stuff on the top plate and it didn’t affect anything. But taking them apart will be tricky. You have to make sure the heads do not touch each other. It’s a big risk but you have nothing to loose if it’s not working I guess. As I’ve said I’ve removed goo and the gooed filter successfully.. and silicone sealed top and bottom. I have a few working drives but bad boards on them.

gkmaia · Aug 29, 2020

What is the reason why the heads should not touch each other?

bibilit · Aug 29, 2020

gkmaia said:
What is the reason why the heads should not touch each other?

Unserviceable afterwards

PB145B · Aug 29, 2020

It can bend the thin pieces of metal that the heads are attached to, causing a cylinder misalignment, therefore rendering the drive useless. It’s not a given that it will happen, but it’s not impossible, so letting them clamp together is best avoided.

gkmaia · Aug 30, 2020

PB145B said:
It can bend the thin pieces of metal that the heads are attached to, causing a cylinder misalignment, therefore rendering the drive useless. It’s not a given that it will happen, but it’s not impossible, so letting them clamp together is best avoided.

Cool, thanks. that makes sense. I've made a little clip on my 3 printer to hold them safe so that wont be a problem.

One interesting thing is on the conners the platter does not fit perfectly to the motor spindle. It has a bit of play. And with that in mind I did an experiment by swapping 2 PCBs, each with it is own calibration, in the same platter assembly to check how the radial calibration would react.

And they both run perfectly. That tells me either there is a cosmic coincidence these platters had the exact same physical alignment or the tolerances for radial alignment are pretty high on these conners.

bibilit · Aug 30, 2020

I agree, I also have a full bag of bad controller boards.

I have been able to save a few drives, swapping things around, but I have been left with more bad controllers than drives alone.

techknight · Aug 31, 2020

You know, the more I think about this, the more I find it not surprising.

The voltages tend to go hog wild in the Portable when things arnt kosher, or towards the end of its service life before needing recapped so its probably blown some ICs on those boards.

I have found ALOT of bad SWIMs and logic ICs on portables for this very reason. Whos to say it hasnt done similar damage to the drive controllers?

aplmak · Nov 24, 2021

techknight said:
You know, the more I think about this, the more I find it not surprising.

The voltages tend to go hog wild in the Portable when things arnt kosher, or towards the end of its service life before needing recapped so its probably blown some ICs on those boards.

I have found ALOT of bad SWIMs and logic ICs on portables for this very reason. Whos to say it hasnt done similar damage to the drive controllers?

Techknight I totally agree.. rogue voltage fried a chip or two on non recapped. It would be nice to know what chip(s) has failed.. it could be a cheap repair thus saving all these boards…

all2coolnick · Aug 23, 2023

I only had one CP-3045 Macintosh Portable hard drive and it just kept spinning up and down. I opened it up and cleaned off all the goo but it was still the same. Turns out it was the mechanism rather than the controller board and I was able to swap the CP-3045 controller board into a standard SCSI Conner CP-3040A and that drive now works fine in my Portable. I have not tried it with any other Conner drive models but the boards certainly seem interchangeable for this one.
This is an alternative option to getting a 34-pin to 50-pin adapter if you have a faulty Portable hard disk and want to fit a standard SCSI drive.

alexGS · Oct 5, 2023

all2coolnick said:
I only had one CP-3045 Macintosh Portable hard drive and it just kept spinning up and down. I opened it up and cleaned off all the goo but it was still the same. Turns out it was the mechanism rather than the controller board and I was able to swap the CP-3045 controller board into a standard SCSI Conner CP-3040A and that drive now works fine in my Portable. I have not tried it with any other Conner drive models but the boards certainly seem interchangeable for this one.
This is an alternative option to getting a 34-pin to 50-pin adapter if you have a faulty Portable hard disk and want to fit a standard SCSI drive.

I had the same thing happen - Portable drive spinning up and down repeatedly - it was sad because it was working, and had interesting data which I was about to copy off, but the drive suddenly made a loud clunk from the heads, and never worked again. I took a 40MB Connor drive from a Classic, which didn’t work, and I fitted the board from the Portable’s drive. After I had fixed the head arm bumpers, it sprang into life and even booted the Portable with 7.0.1 that had been installed on the Classic. That was a happy day; the old data seems gone, but every cloud has a FWB Toolkit. No, I mean every cloud has a Silverlining…

Connor Mac Portable 3045 40MB Drives

gkmaia

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aplmak

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gkmaia

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