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It's funny, I can't see the video on my Linux laptop, but I can hear the sound, and from that alone it sounds like a familiar thing --- the arm not being able to swing fully through its entire range of travel. What happens is that after the brake releases, the Widget tries to swing the arm over...

As for the problem, you could imagine all kinds of things being possible at this stage: bad servo, broken head amplifiers, controller on the fritz, intermittent connections, platters stolen by cunning thieves, spirits attempting to communicate by banging the heads in Morse code, etc. We will...

Can you record a video of this happening? Widgets are fragile. They are the first hard drive made by a company that had never made hard drives before, and it shows. At the (nearly) 40-year mark for the devices, you might think of them a bit more like Rubik's cubes --- puzzles to try and solve...

Excellent, thank you for testing. It's a good thing you have a new one on the way. Once you have it installed, it would probably be a good idea to let the Widget run for a while to loosen up the spindle bearing and get it used to turning again. If the spindle doesn't turn when you give the...

When you carry out a fresh install of LOS (3.x and maybe earlier versions?), it gives you the option of sharing the disk with MacWorks. I've never tried it, but I suspect that's part of what's needed here. I would not expect there to be a way to take an existing MacWorks or LOS installation and...

As you wish, and it's a wise philosophy. This said, bootstrapping BLU is not really risky. In fact, if you unplug your Widget --- which would prevent you from accidentally misusing BLU to overwrite the data it contains --- then I don't think it can do any damage to your Lisa whatsoever, unless...

Good progress! You don't necessarily need to wait for your Floppy Emu to run BLU. See "APPENDIX A Bootstrapping" in the BLU manual --- you can load it over a serial cable and run it today if you want...

Mine too. While it wouldn't be something I'd count on, it wouldn't surprise me too much if the Widget we're trying to fix here spun well enough after some exercise. @BEU , glad to know you have an oscilloscope. Do give us an update if you try out the quad darlington on a breadboard!

This is retrocomputing :) There's always a chance that more components are bad. If the motor continues to avoid spinning, then we'll keep working to find the problem. But there's not a lot around the quad darlington array: there's the motor and there's the microcontroller, with its...

Hmm. I think that motor lubrication may not be the problem here; I think I've encountered spindles that were harder to turn than that. Meanwhile, I didn't realise that Q3 was good --- I thought it was bad! We would expect the resistance across any of the windings to be quite low anyway, and I...

It sounds like you're most of the way there. The BLU manual tells you how to transfer a hard drive image to a different computer over the serial port. "Read from disk to serial port" is in the "Hard Disk Functions" menu. You may want to verify that BLU and your Pi can speak to each other...

The modem-looking thing is an Ethernet card. The BNC connector is for 10BASE2 and the D-sub connector is an AUI connector.

I've never heard of anyone selecting a Raspberry Pi in particular as a place to backup files to, but there's no reason you couldn't use one for that. What BLU wants to talk to is another computer with a serial port, so if you want to backup to a Pi, you'll need to find either a USB to serial...

I knew this day would come :) First, a criticism. It's always interesting to see the insides of a Widget, but I don't think it was wise to open this one yet. Hard drives want to be kept clean inside, and while the risk of catastrophe for an open drive is sometimes overstated, it's certain that...

Lots of computers used these foam-and-foil capacitive keyboards, which were mostly made by a company called Key Tronic of Spokane, WA. Why Apple selected this option instead of others I can't say --- they probably satisfied some price/quality tradeoff --- but here are some other users I can...

IDEfile is an excellent and dependable option. I've used mine now for about a decade. The selector program that @mg.man mentions was written for a hard drive emulator that I made. You can build it from scratch based on the resources at that link --- you'll probably want to make this version by...

If you have a computer with a serial port, then the BLU utility makes it not so difficult to take a snapshot of the drive.

Looks likely to me that this can run the Office System. If you see "H/88" on the Lisa's "menu bar" during the power-on test, then you know for sure that you can. Congratulations!

Does the capacitor itself still measure well? C3 is not really doing anything too complicated here as far as I can tell. Sorry to keep asking questions --- this is still a mystery to me and I'd like to rule out a defective cap as an answer!

Congratulations! I am surprised but will try to understand better how that mattered. How did you figure it out?