Testing and fixing 13 ancient hard drives (Part 2/2) 

Don't feel bad about opening them, especially if the alternative is recycling them. They will all need service eventually, might as well get used to it

What you can try is, before spinning up the hard drive, is to screw the cover back on, the angular speed of the platter creates a cushion where the heads "floats" on, and without the cover, it can't create that cushion of air, the heads need to "lift" some micrometers away from the platter, in their parking position, they will touch the platter, but if they can't lift themselves, the hard drive has less chance to work, some hard drives will work with the cover off, some don't, i always put the cover back on :)

You did a really good job on saving almost a dozen drives from the trash! It has to be very satisfying to see that some of them don't even have surface errors :-)

I'd definitely use some kind of HDD diagniostic and repair software such as MHDD or Victoria before opening a disk. Plus I recommend zeroing all of those HDDs. Also, Conner drives used to have that weird platter surface.

Ah, just got to the part about opening hard drives, not in a clean room. Well I can tell you that, back in the late 80's my work computer was an XT-class machine, and I had a Seagate 5MB drive with it's lid removed working for a very long time with no problems. So the whole clean room thing is probably a good idea technically, but not 100% necessary for this sort of thing.

I have also opened Conner drives in a normal room, with capacities that low it is not really all that sensitive. Fixed an 84 meg drive due to the melted rubber and all that mess.

The look of these Conner drives' platters is normal. The head must be parked in a specified position in order to drive initialize. Once I've managed to adjust a proper width of foam tape replacing rubber bump and made the drive to initialize successfully every time.

Just found an old white keyboard,the last piece for my retro PC corner,while cleaning it this will be a good video to watch

Yeah, it's alright to open older drives like this one especially if you hear a grating or ticking sound. I always blow them out with compressed air (to get rid of any dust that might have landed on the platters) before powering them back up. In the case of those circular rings, I THINK some drive platters may actually look like this and be fine (it might be part of the manufacturing process or something). But If you see a ring that is only on a specific part of the drive or under the head, that's a clear indicator of a head crash at some point.

Well done, was very entertaining. Can't wait to see the SCSI-Video.

This video gave me the courage to crack open a Miniscribe 2021 10MB MFM hard that I had pronounced dead (apparently due to stuck head stepper). I opened her up and gently rotated the stepper motor and... Formatted perfectly and is now, for the first time in almost 30 years, booting DOS!

The Seagate ST3250A do have the typical Seagate sound from the era :)

Good to see that this many drives survived!

Thanks for the wonderful sounds :)

i really miss good old scandisk

This was a lil' bit of an ASMR in and of itself. Hope to see a *full-blown* Hard Drive ASMR soon!

The weird scratch looking stuff is actually normal for some drives. Kalok drives have a similar surface to the Connor. If it was a head crash the platters would have a deep and noticeable groove

The ST-351A/X is one of two 3.5" SL hard drives to ever ship with a stepper motor.

I've always heard that the hdd builds an air cushion between the head and the platters so they don't touch one another. The fact it touched the platters when you moved it could be because the platters weren't spinning. The subtle circular pattern might be normal, I've seen it in conner drives that I managed to fix, so it's possible that it's a manufacturing side effect that's only visual

I found that the Secret to Soldering is to use allot of flux on the PCB and only heat the iron to the solder melt point. You can always clean off the excess flux.

I definitely enjoyed the video, that was fun. And the results were all over the place! Some seemed to have lead fairly easy lives, some were somewhere in the middle (bad sectors but still serviceable), and some were just thrashed until they died. About opening hard drives; if the room was dusty, pet hair all over the place, fans blowing, then yeah, teardown is probably not a good idea. But if the room is clean and care is taken, I don't think it's impossible to do at home

The rubber material might have contaminated the surface on the Conner. But old Conner's suffer for these degrading materials issues. They probably did not expect their drives to be used 30-35 years on :) I watched a video where someone was actually able to revive a disk with rubber stop issues by cleaning the surface with isopropyl alcohol. I believe it was a Plus HardCard 20. I have yet to be able to try this fix myself, would be interesting to see how such an invasive procedure would actually work. Also if there are multiple platters, it might be pretty hard to get in there to clean all the surfaces, but maybe the real damage is only limited to top facing side. I have successfully cleaned floppy disks with IPA in the past to recover data off of them as a last resort, so fixing hard drives this way might prove to be successful in some cases, as long as there are no scratches.

I would really appreciate ASMR type videos, perhaps not the 200+ MB hard drives, but the MFM or

I did manage a platter transplant a few years back. Needless to say they were identical disk drives,the electronics were totaled on one. Didn't have a clean room just a lot of luck and it worked out okay, just took what i needed of it and then dumped it, once air gets in it won last.

“I got inspired by my daughter, who’s really into ASMR, but not ASMR hard drives, of course” I probably laughed way too hard at that haha! Great video once again, it’s quite surprising how many of those hard drives still work after so many years. But that probably is because of less complexity and better quality hardware.

Loving the video's my friend Keep it up and God Bless you and be safe!

It's noted that Mimi's mother is a red headed Caucasian adapted to the Japanese culture very well since her husband is Japanese. Which is why Mimi enjoys and quickly adapted to American culture. The same can be said about season 2 Davis who also enjoy's American culture also, who father looks more Native American than Japanese, and mother who also look more Caucasian, than Japanese.

Great video and fix on the drive with the bad capacitor.....grin

you were very meticulous and professional. you gave those beautiful hard drives the best chance to come back to life the 20mb probably has some problem on the controll board, some capacitor out of speck that makes it not initialize or detect track zero

I had one HDD that would not even spin. So I picked it up and gave it a quick rotation, and bingo, the discs began to spin. I was then able to save the files onto another drive. But even after getting up and going, it always required the same mechanical startup assistance to get the discs spinning. As far as I know, the motor starts with a high current on startup, and then shifts to low current once reaching the proper RPM. So it seems as though the startup current circuit was no longer working.

That Alps hard drive showed up more than 1024 cylinders on autodetect. Pre-Pentium machines are famous for their 1024 cylinder problem, so that's why you can only access 35 MB of that hard drive, because DOS will see it as a 1024 cyl drive without a translator software like Ontrack.

Ah the sweet sweet clunks on the ST3250A, this is a very familiar sound to me, can't remember which PC I had one of these in, but the sounds are super nostalgic.

Hi there and THANKS fr those informative videos!!! I can't wait that you do the scsi ones especially the Compaq 142003 566MB SCSI since I have a Compaq 142004 1.05 gig SCSI that will not spin up and would really like to (IF possible) recover the data to put on a sd card on my Amiga. Hope to see this soon!!!! ;-)

I know a use for that old Connor 20 MB IDE drive that isn't working. Turn it into a speaker, a hard drive speaker that is. Just find the connections to the coil that makes the arm move and hook your amp to that. You'll need something pretty powerful but I was able to run one off a small car radio. 10 watts should be enough.

Great video, really brings back the old days, thank you so much! I think the Conner CP-3024 has suffered a head crash on the other side of the platter which we didn't get to see. In some cases the heads were completely detached, causing the rest of the head assembly to scratch on the surface. It would certainly make these ringing noises. By the way: I would recommend you to *never* move the heads across the platters as long as they are not spinning, or you use a tool to lift the heads off the platters in advance. While the platters are spinning a tiny air cushion builds between them and the heads so both do not touch. The parking zone of a drive may allow for direct contact but any other area probably won't. Moving the heads manually on top of the surface can bend and warp the metal spring mechanism holding each head in place, with more damage to follow. The tiniest amount of skew is potentially very harmful. It can also cause microscopic surface damage that you won't be able to see.

ST351 AX was my 1st IDE crossing over from my Seagate 40mb MFM

You can see the tracks as rings on old hard drives, that platter was not damaged besides that small area where the heads were parked.

The 13 disks of Scooby Doo! Quite cool how much they still work - wonder if todays SSDs will last as long?

If a drive doesn't spin-up just tap it on top with your finger, ie, it loosens stuck motors. When it's not spinning the heads should be parked so it shouldn't do any damage, not that it matters when it's not working anyway - lol -. Odd that the old drives didn't have the cyls printed on the label, I guess a Goo would've found them.

Hey, that disk being reported 35Mb, yeah, that must be infected by the FLIP virus, you need to wipe that MBR and partitions and start from 0

I wish someone would make a plugin SSD adapter with a speaker to emulate the sound of a retro HDD.

25:00 This was probably in a system that didn't use color. (e.g. a monochrome luggable laptop, a Compaq Portable, or even a Toshiba T-Series.)

Ah haaa, so my advice helped with the larger disk :)

Hdd regenerator or the open source version can recover disk that have dead sectors marking It and rearrange the new start of the partition. Great job

I've had to resort to opening a drive to get the heads to unpark. It worked well enough to backup the data that was on the disk, and was still working fine once I was done. As for longevity, that's anyone's guess. Once the backup was done, I didn't need to check any more. There's a lot of hyperbole in computing, and a great example is "Once you open a drive it's dead immediately". Nah, it just means the drive will get dirtier over time and ultimately get dust trapped under the heads and stop working. People act like you just tossed the drive into a crusher the minute outside air touches it...

That TEAC may be repairable, there must be a blow cap or similar stopping the motors to spin up, but as it even is detected if you get those back up and running you should be set to go!

I was never successful in fixing one, it really requires a lot of patience and planning every move

I do hope you are parking the heads on those drives before putting them back in storage. Early IDE drives *probably* auto-park, but with some of these first-gens I'm not sure I'd count on it.

On a low density 20mb I am not surprised to see weird texture, don't know if this is original though but I've seen it before

I just remembered pulling the cover off a 2.5" 320GB drive and saving the data after the heads got stuck. The customer had dropped a lamp on the laptop while it was powered on. I was surprised when I managed to save their work.

Yeah a harddrive “ASMR” video would be cool. I always associate the sound of harddrives with coffee makers somehow. Maybe it’s because some of the gentle, soft mechanical sounds sound a bit like an old fashioned drip coffeemaker (those sound pleasant unlike coffee bean grinders that make loud noises).

The Seagate ST351A/X is definitely my favourite. What a combination of technologies in that thing. One question though; does it have autopark? I couldn't hear any movement when you switched the power off.

I think the old Conner drives have the most unique type writer clicking sound and are my favorite to put in an old 386 or 486 because of the sound they make. I tested them with “Speedsys” hard drive benchmark and they scored higher than the IBM DSAA Drives in reads/writes. But I am not an expert in hard drives so I don’t know how good they really are but since there are still so many old Conner drives around it is obvious that they are resilient and enduring. I have never had an old Conner drive go totally bad but they do get bad sectors here and there. What do you think ?

From my personal experience with an old Micropolis drive, drives of a certain vintage can be really temperamental about what area of the disk they will actually initialize properly in. I notice the Conner CP3024 lets the heads float out a fair distance from the inner ring of the platter. I wonder how the drive would respond if you gently hold the heads against the inner bumpstop during powerup? Additionally, the little "tink"ing sound you heard as you moved the heads along the outside edge of the platter is probably a physical defect in the platter surface. I hear this sort of thing alot in MFM drives. Probably caused by shock at some point but impossible to tell. Not necessarily fatal, but lends itself towards the idea it might be damaged pretty substantially. Shame about that Teac drive too! I'm sure it's very rare

Those brass colored slotted screws on the 3024 spindle seem highly suspect, shouldn't there be 8 machine screws in there?

There is nothing bad about opening an ancient drive of such a low density. Make your work place as clean as possible, prevent air from moving too much - close windows, doors, wash and dry your hands and if you are super careful use some cheap face mask (we all have from COVID time, yes? 🤣) But anyway I have seen MFM drives sitting open for years! in some box or office place and after blowing dust away they were working! So it is not ideal but definitely not as lethal for those drives as many people thinks! Still be aware you have 40-80Mb on a surface where today you have some TB!! These heads compared to thr modern ones are like you compared to a bus!

That Quantum prodrive will likely have this deteriorated rubber inside as well and you really have to check the input capacitors on it as well because they tend to start leak electrolyte onto the PCB at this point, and BTW the name is Conner with an E on those drives, Not Connor ;)

Can you make a video how to setup the seagate ST351 A/X in XT MODE?

i used to have a Compaq portable with a 40mb drive that formatted fine and passed scandisk but it would corrupt itself after a week or two anyway even without being powered on, i assumed it was weak megnetics on the old platters but i really dont know

Did you notice that the Connor CP-3024 had odd screws holding the patter, looks like someone else has been in there before you and removed the platter, maybe that is why it's scratched.

Do some MFM HD friend! :)

You could’ve removed the capacitor with the soldering iron, you didn’t need to go to all the trouble of using your “heat gun.”

"You look like the pharmacy just updated the inventory..."

16:09 There seem to be a couple of screws missing from the spindle and two brass screws in nonsymetric positions. Do you think its been opened before?

Still need to test the following SCSI drives but that will be for another video : Quantum ProDrive LPS 40MB SCSI Compaq 142003 566MB SCSI When are you going to test them and maybe fix them??? I have a Compaq 142003 1GIG SCSI drive not working and would like to see a vid on yours to see if it has the same problem as mine. Please do an update on the 2 scsi HDs that you have. THANKS!!!! 😁

On the centre platter of connor cp246 40mb it looks like 2 screws missing. Like gold color ones? Probably just me not seeing correctly. Nice

Hah, my first HDD was in fact the 20Mb model of that 40Mb Seagate hehehe and on a XT man I was jealous of those having that model!

Yeah, geek style ASMR sounds great. Or imagine a museum where people come to listen to old hard drives spinning.

the scsi drives are normally better quality, serious chance, they'll be still working

the gunk on the one conner was just foam, it tends to melt with age and turn into a goo

Those Teac models are quite rare, and they aren't reliable either. Yet to see someone with a working one, the PCB likely has something failed on it if you are willing to try and find out what could've failed. Really find those Teac drives interesting.

well its to late for it now.. but theres a tool "HDD Regenerator" might have did the trick on the 1.2GB Connor Drive :-)

I think those old drives seems to last better than newer drives. Perhaps they are more robust? Many years ago I used to work in an importing company and I sold also quantum drives and I liked them. I bought a 40 MB drive for my home computer, which was Atari ST.

Is there some device which would add the sound and vibration of a real hard-drive, sounds of head seek, to systems based on SSD and Compact-Flash cards?

old pata seagate drives 80 gb/40 gb still running in my system after 20 years they aged well.

If you have one of those room HEPA air filters you can at least run that for 15 minutes to remove most of the dust in the room.

Harddrives manufacture date would nice

Now take them all and make a JBOD :)

Would vinyl gloves have prevented that finger touch of the platter or would a vinyl touch be bad as well? It doesn't hurt to try to fix a broken hard drive so let the experts criticize all they want. A normal person does not have a clean room in their house. Nothing ventured,nothing gained.

Wonder if we will be able to boot Win 10 or 11 from an SD drive or a USB stick after 30 years. I think I know the answer already, they just ain't made to last.

Now show the highest hour HDD. i have one with 74k hours still works. I wish i had a server to put it in so i can see it go to 100k

I am so glad that HDD's are so close to going away.

What does "old" hardrive mean ..1 year , 5 years , 500 years ?

Reflash the Hard Disk's internal Bios.

No clean room? Set yourself up in the bathroom. Before opening the drive, run the shower on cold for 5 minutes to knock much of the airborne dust out of the room. YMMV.

You Dutch? Or at least the operating system on the Connor cp 346 is dutch

The gasket was there because they are filled with inert gas

Nah, i don’t really like Conner drives at all. I tend to be in love with Quantums, Kalok and Maxtor from the early to mid 90s. All the Connors I ever used appeared to be junk

You dont need a ancien pc to test ide hard drives you need an ancient pc to test isa or scazy hard drives

In item is antique when its more than 100 years old. In other words, No harddrive on the earth is an antique. Vintage maybe, but not antique.

ide is not antique , still used in old 775 systems.

That's very bad hot air soldering skills. We can clearly see solder was only softened and not melted, and capacitors were almost ripped off. You need to preheat whole area, melt solder and then when you pull out capacitor it will require almost no force. Then apply some flux and you can do this in reverse way soldering caps to repaired PCB, but soldering iron will do the job fine.

why do you want hdds u der 20gb?

Rings on surface not good .

ITS not pronounced tea ak it teak