Method to revive hard drives from the 80s

hey there everyone how's it going real quick video today so I recently picked up this Tandy 1000 TL for $10 from a local seller here in Portland and there's a little bit of a problem with the hard drive though so I want to show you a little trick on how to revive some of these old hard drives taking a look inside this computer you can see that it has what is essentially a hard card this is a 20 megabyte Western Digital three-and-a-half-inch MFM my hard drive and still on a card here that contains both the controller and the hard drive and it has a bracket to kind of hold all together it's plugged into an 8-bit isa slot this hard drives been having an issue let me show you what it's doing the problem I'm having with this computer is the hard drive acts a little bit erratic what happens when you turn the computer on is the stripe spins up normally it sounds fine but then as it starts to seek as it's doing its initial startup test kind of make some strange noises sometimes it just spins itself down it doesn't always boot it just is acting a little strange now with old hard drives back in the day one thing that's very different about these drives and compared to new drives is that the heads are positioned on the disk using a stepper motor and on this drive here's the motor right here now on some drives like Seagate drives the motor is actually facing the other direction so if you flip the drive over you can see the bottom of the stepper motor but on this one as you can see it's sort of the shaft is facing outward towards the side of the drive many of the three and a half inch hard drives at the time where they of this style and actually proved to be slightly unreliable and later they've moved to a voice coil setup which is basically high power magnets with electromagnetic coils on there and the electronics can energize the coils in a certain way which will then position has very quickly and very accurately because there's no motor doing it it's all completely electromagnetic is not something that wears out or has issues over time but this stepper motor is very similar to the stepper motors you might find in a 3d printer or even a dot matrix printer of the time these motors allow relatively high accuracy position but they are not super fast now let's turn this hard drive on and take a look at what happens so take a look to the shaft here this little black mark on it moving back and forth that it's doing now is the normal startup test now of course it's not doing air right now but during that test it would make strange noise and kind of clunky sound sometimes while I was trying to position the heads well of course now that I'm making a video the hard drive seems to be working perfectly but I'm still gonna show you what I'm gonna do to this hard drive that will make it work more reliably and I've actually fixed another of the identical drives using this method and I also fixed a mini scribe 20 megabyte hard drive on a macintosh SC using this exact method so because it's just a normal motor and it has barians in there what happens is over time like the 30 years that have passed since this Drive is manufactured the barians get a little gummed up and what happens is stepper motors only have so much power to position themselves and if you try to slow down the seat by say holding this or friction inside the bearings you actually start to have positioning errors which is where the weird noises come from and then the drive controller often just shuts off the drive or it gives up with the Diagnostics so I found what works really well for reviving these drives is adding a couple drops of bearing oil into here along the shaft and it actually makes the drive work properly again I did this on the mini scribe drive on my Mac SC couple years ago and it completely would never work it would make horrible clunking noises and never boot and now two years later the drive is still working absolutely flawlessly it kind of surprised me I thought the drive was a goner but it actually did the trick now this will be the third drive I'm lubricating here and of course this one works mostly reliably as you've seen but I think the oil will do the trick because the other tandon version of this drive I have on my other machine completely also would not work and now works flawlessly so what I typically use is this try flow Teflon synthetic lubricant it's really designed for bicycles and stuff and what I literally do is just add a drop of this onto here spin the drive up have the heads move back and forth and then just add one more drop and that's all it takes let's add the drop of oil and as soon as it dropped there onto the bearing it kind of got waked up and disappeared inside so let's spin this drive up oh well still sounds like it's working absolutely perfectly just like it was before but with my other Tandon Drive after putting the lubricant even the first time on the first power cycle it was still acting a little strange but I power cycled it several times that kind of got better with each time so let's add that second drop I'm gonna give you a little bit of a close-up here so it helps to wipe the oil nozzle off so it doesn't drip but here we go there's another drop of oil you saw I just sort of waked up right onto the bearing there and I don't know if it matters but I find putting it on while the drive is in this orientation of course helps it move in there and most likely if I operate the drive like this it'll help the oil kind of penetrate down there is obviously going to be a bearing on this side then there's gonna be the windings for the motor and they'll be a bearing on the other side okay I have the drive connected let's power it up one more time [Music] well there you go it's been a few days since I did the oil trick and the hard times working absolutely perfectly now no more random seek errors no more clunky noises it's all good as I said earlier in the video I've done this on two other drives both of them have been working flawlessly since I've done it and once over two years now so I think this is a pretty good method to fix drives let me know if you have any clunky drives and you were able to do the oil trick and get your drives working I'd love to hear you know comments that this works or not for other people I've really never saw anything online about this particular technique so yeah please give me some feedback just so you know I will have another video with more in-depth look at this Tandy 1000 and what it took to restore it but for now thanks for watching I appreciate a thumbs up and of course subscribe to more videos take care bye

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement

Views: 106,109

Keywords: MFM, retro, vintage, hard drive, seagate, tandon, western digital, 20 meg, Tandon TM262, WD262, TM362, WD362, 8425SA, Miniscribe

Id: -UJ0YE1a1Fs

Length: 6min 15sec (375 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 02 2017