[Coco] Hard disk repairs, was Linux, was Drivewire....

[Mike Pepe]

Make that 3 then. I successfully resoldered a head wire on a full height
5.25" MFM drive as well.

Tolerances weren't quite so tight back then. Running a modern drive with
the cover off results in data death in 30 seconds or less.

-----Original Message-----
From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com]
On Behalf Of Phill Harvey-Smith
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 9:10 AM
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
Subject: [Coco] Hard disk repairs, was Linux, was Drivewire....

Joel Ewy wrote:
> Gene Heskett wrote:
> Current kernels won't, but it certainly did in the past.  My first
Linux 
> installation was a '386-SX/40 with 16M of RAM and a couple 40M MFM 
> drives (Well, one of them only formatted to about 32M after I opened
the 
> case and dug out a broken-off R/W head [I know, don't EVER do this --
it 
> was ruined anyway, and worked fine for me until I replaced them with a

> 100M IDE drive.  Just used it for swap, anyway...]).  

Humm glad to know I'm not the only one to have done this, in my case it 
was a full height MFM 5.25" drive, the problem for me was that the head 
that had crashed was head 0 so the drive would not even spin up. So I 
whiped out my soldering iron and cut the connections to head 0 and 3, 
and swapped them, worked fine as a 15MB drive for a couple of years 
after that, mind I only ever used it as a test drive.

Cheers.

Phill.

-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.

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