How I recovered a failed 1983 Rodime MFM Hard Drive (COMPAQ PORTABLE PLUS - Part II)

[@HTMLEXP]

Those Rodime MFM drives have a very distinctive sound. I have an ACT Apricot Xi with a 10Mb Rodime drive.

[@capolaya]

My first computer had a 30MB one. I clearly remember when it failed and made a characteristic sound which I haven't forgotten despite more than 30 years have passed. 'chuck-uh-chuck chuck-uh-chuck (x2) chee kee'

[@MotownBatman]

Always wanted to see one of these, What a killer piece of history. hardware

[@hammerpaal]

Mr. Know-It-All needs his own Yt channel. I like how he tries to insult you in a hilarious way. =)

[@snap_oversteer]

These 3.5" Rodimes seem pretty reliable, I helped mine to get unstuck just with a screw driver through the 5.25" cage hole and it came back to life after almost a decade of sleeping.

[@MrHBSoftware]

stessing the drive is good...prevents stiction in the near future, also heats up the bearings and softens the old grease....like i do with both my bad knees...it hurts a lot when i start jogging but after some minutes it starts to feel good and they work better the rest of the week

[@SyldabiaHacks]

A nice job to make on this machines, is remove older power supply circuit and remplace by a current and efficient circuit like atx sfx models. Are small and easy to adapt. Only some times you need -5v but you can add it with a dc to dc converter. From 12 to 5 aislated to put positive to ground and negative to -5v pin on atx connector.

[@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR]

Yeah, I'm actually thinking about doing something like that to restore an old IBM machine, which has a broken PSU

[@capolaya]

You are lucky that the drive worked so quickly, you could have had a failed head stepper motor... This happened to me with an old Mac SCSI drive.

[@JohnKiniston]

I have a IBM 5155 with two non functional 360k drives, I dread opening it to try and repair the drives.

[@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR]

I just recently had to do it for the 5155 as well, though it was not captured on video, as I did already quiet a few videos on fixing floppy drives already. Nevertheless, you find some useful hints on the floppy drives used in the 5155 here: www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/QumeTrak_142_5%C2%BC-inch_Floppy_Disk_Drive Beware, later revisions of the 5155 used NEC drives. Though, if you have the QumeTrak, it was in my experience very straight forward. For me, it took just some head cleaning to make them working again.