Bring back to life a stuck Macintosh Quantum / Conner SCSI hard drive

[Ferrix97]

It seems like 2015 is the year of failing drives and stuck heads, I've made a very quick and rough video showing how to squeeze out some extra life from stuck drives. This trick also works on the bigger "brick" drives usually found in earlier macs like the SE ad SE/30. And also works on SCSI PowerBook Conner drives too!

The only thing you have to avoid is touching the disk, it also recommended to rotate the disk while moving the heads, you don't need to do it in a dust-free environment since the capacity of each patter is quite low and the heads are huge compared to modern drives.

The drive in the video is a 40MB, if you have the 80MB variant, you'll see two disks and four heads, the 40MB has a fake disk and head arm on top.

 

[uniserver]

make sure you go back through all your videos and give proper credit to this forum all the people you learned from.

 

[Ferrix97]

Yes, both you and techknight discovered and solved most (if not all) of the problems I fixed in my videos, I'm just sharing the way I fix them.

I know that techknight made a video a few years ago, I've just showed how to make it less temporary by isolating the molten rubber thus preventing the head to get stuck again.

 

[techknight]

Its still temporary. Eventually the rubber will lose its form and melt all over the place, throwing a tarry mess all over the drive, thus destroying it. The only, and i mean ONLY fix is to remove it all. and replace it with a new one, or a make-shift one from an old cassette/reel to reel tape pinch roller (which is what I did). Or use a super small o-ring if they make one. 

Oh, and the newer drives have the rubber bumper UNDER the platter itself. Fun to get to. I only did 1 drive that way, and I removed the platter and head stack assembly to get to it. Nightmare. But this technique works easily with single platter drives. 

Multi-platter drives require a special removal tool so they dont slip and cause cylinder mis-alignment. 

 

[360alaska]

I probably should do something like that to my portable's 40 mb drive before it dies...

 

[Ferrix97]

The Conner drives have a much bigger problem: the gasket that seals the two halves is also made of rubber, overtime it melts and becomes liquid. If you don't remove it in time, it will melt and coat the disk with molten rubber, making it impossible to recover

 

[techknight]

Yea, theres that too. 

 

[Apache Thunder]

Unfortunately my drive doesn't use voice coil for the head. As far as I can tell the platters look clean on my drive. I opened it up briefly this morning and did not see any scratches/marks. Sorta odd how this drive just up and quit. The guy who gave it to me said it worked before he pulled it out of the SE/30. So it was only sitting in storage for 10 years or so. So what ever can happen to a drive while it's not on is what killed it. I think that narrows out head crash. That can't happen if the drive isn't spinning.

 

[techknight]

But it can if it fires up for the first time in a decade. The head could have been stuck to the platter, the platter spins up and pulls one of the heads slightly out of alignment, without physical defects. That is also, a head crash. Head crash/damage comes in various degrees of severity. All having the same result: Bad drive. 

Oh, plus your going on a decades old phrase: "Well it worked when i put it in storage 30 years ago". Well duh.... haha. Any 68K mac probably worked years ago when put in storage. Well they dont now, with all the leaking caps, blown up batteries, etc... 

 

[Cera]

What about working without any bumper? my dead quantum seems to work again after reading this. i found two rubbers that seemed perfect but a little bit larger so the heads went crazy

Tried with no bumpers and seems to work, btw i imagine it's no good for the physical stress. unfortunately i don't have pinch rollers of that size but i'll check if i can find something that will fit.

And yes that thing was a real gel and difficult to remove also with alcol, plus in my quantum one reel won't lift because it's integrated in the chassis so very difficult to clean and also fit something new...

 

[Cera]

made a disaster don't know what happened!  probably a screwdriver on the table shorted something on the hard disk i'm not sure, there was a little smoke.

switched off, now if i connect the power to this drive the mac produce strange ripetitive sounds and won't boot,quite black screen , but only with floppy it's all ok.

If i connect only the 50 pin without power the mac works good. I'm a little worried about having damaged the scsi interface... but if i connect the adapter and the drive which i was talking this thread:   https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/26483-macintosh-se-80-pin-scsi-hd/ seems all good except that that drive is not compatible and i can' t test really anything!! what do you think it' s possible i damaged the 50 pin interface?

I don' t care so much about the quantum i' m a little worried about the motherboard...

EDIT  tried to connect the quantum to a pc power supply and it literally stops it like it do on the mac! there' a visible burnout chip L2722 st88942

 

[bitsplusatoms]

Yes, both you and techknight discovered and solved most (if not all) of the problems I fixed in my videos, I'm just sharing the way I fix them.

I know that techknight made a video a few years ago, I've just showed how to make it less temporary by isolating the molten rubber thus preventing the head to get stuck again.

To all the people involved in this: THANK YOU. This allowed me to revive the drive from my wife's old SE/30 (after cleaning, recapping, etc.). Even if it is only temporary, I can grab the old files which is a fun look back at what we were up to in the late 80's/early 90's.