@@kreuner11 I'm merely making reference to the fact that a lot of these channels buy something and hope a bit of IPA will fix it and call it a restoration/repair
Great job on the troubleshooting, and you showed why it was often better to just leave systems up and running to prevent drive and stepper motors from freezing up. For those who hated the noise in this video: I used to support hundreds of VAX workstations and mini-computers that used MFM ST-series drives. One notorious problem was a hard graphite "button" held onto the end of the spindle shaft, used to bleed off static charges as I recall. After years of continuous use the shafts would wear a dimple into the graphite and cause a very loud high-pitched shriek. Think of chalk on a blackboard but at Mach 2! We finally figured it out and were able to shift the graphite button slightly so the spindle had a fresh spot to work on. On some drives we just removed it completely (not my preferred choice). I hope that helps anyone hitting that same problem!
Wow what a trip down memory lane. I installed a LOT of these back in the day to clients of my firm. It was so funny, the sales person would interview the client, and ask "would you like a hard disk drive?". Can you even imagine? You could sell 15 of these a month a make a LOT of money. The IBM machines were really over built and bulletproof. Heavy, very heavy.
great video! Wonderful end to DosCember. I got my first PC when I was 8yrs old. It was a SYNTREX 80286 that a neighbor handed me down. It was a 8/16mhz chip and the CMOS had a bad backup battery. I eventually got a new battery for it and then I was up late one night and I saw the advert for my PC on the Home Shopping Network on cable TV! I saw the ad and they said my PC had 1MB of RAM! I was operating with just the 640kb RAM up until this point and only at 8mhz. I went into my BIOS and switched my RAM to allow using the extended memory, added HIMEM.SYS to my startup files and now I had essentially downloaded more RAM. I also set my core clock to a massive 8mhz overclock. So I have lots of nostalgia for DOS machines. It is such a wonderful era and I am thankful that you are helping to preserve it. Happy new year ! Had to edit and add I had a 20MB western digital HDD in this PC.
Mind-boggling. I remember how, almost 40 years ago, my coworkers and I stood up and looked into the hallway of our megacorporation as the IBM PC was trundled down the path to some high-powered' manager's corner office, ensconced in its cabinet and escorted by two security staff. Obviously, the manager was going to perform some computer magic and grow the company with that machine. 10 MB hard drive! I just looked over at one of my external -- run-of-the-mill -- 4 TB drives and did some mental calculations. I'd need a warehouse full of those 10 MB drives to equal the storage capacity of that cigarette package-sized 4 TB drive. I remember when I thought I had all the storage I'd need when I bought my Leading Edge XT-clone computer that came with a whopping 30 MD hard drive.
I am Just speechless and amazed with the work you do on this old machines! I admire your knowledge and your patience overcoming various obstacles!!! Keep up the good work :)
This reminds me how I saved my western digital hdd (21mb mfm drive). First it had bad tantalum caps which prevented the computer from starting. After replacing them, the hdd was spinning up, then stopping. I was about to throw the towel on it until one time it remained and was readable. So I let it run for a couple of hours that way and then it was starting ok. However soon after it did the same thing again, so I decided to run it even longer. Since then it's been perfectly usable ^^ Sometimes these old drives just need some help to work again :D
@@RetroSpector78 Funny enough, I was looking at a PI1541 build, and they have a little speaker to minic the real 1541 noises, and I'm thinking "this is both totally pointless, and exactly what my SD2IEC needed"
Xt ide is just a good option to test quickly softwares and other stuffs on some machines in progress but it's not a definitive solution to make a good and '' original '' restoration.
@@francoisfritz198 There's a lot of line between "period correct", and "functional in modern day". My current modern systems all got outfitted with Ethernet for getting files on and off. I know LGR uses a XT-IDE in almost all his machines to make it easy to sideload.
Nice work reviving the hard drive! I think it's very important that more attention is put into saving and maintaining old hard drives since they're often replaced with solid state solutions (which of course are much better for day to day use).
Very nice restoration! 8 bit ISA slots, MFM hard disk, and low level formats reminds me of my first computer back in my childhood in the mid 90s. That computer I had would have been a decade old then, but I valued and loved tinkering with it just as much as any new machine. I gained such a deep understanding of how PCs work. These days, if you mention a IRQ conflict to most people that work with IT, those people would be totally perplexed as to what an IRQ is.
Hehe saw that yeah ... I also have a commodore pc but don’t use it much anymore. Need to pick up the pc and violently turn it 90 degrees 10 times before the hard drive starts
This is a great computer history on electronic fields. Thank you for sharing this priceless treasure of information. Oh my god you have Peak Electronic test device, I met the owner in Buxton and went inside the main factory/office where they hand built these great machines. I might order one in the near future.
This is incredibly useful, seeing in detail how you revived that ST-412. :) I'd be too scared to open it up like that, but now I'm almost looking forwards to finding a dead drive, haha. Happy new year man, all the best for 2021. :)
my 3.5'' fuji mfm hard drive do the same noise... sound! it also run nicely, after low level format. your ibm series is just perfect, by your fault i have an p70 now :) and your tips about connecting a modern floppy drive help me even if the original drive recap solve the problem, thanks a lot! but now all my plasma board axial capacitors have just leaked and i wait some new ones from US, because the plasma price is just amazing and the spare is very rare. thanks again for all of your work, take care, ''passez de bonnes fêtes de fin d'année"
Thank you lol I just picked a 5160 with a 286 in and with the same power supply, not wanting to cause more damage I unplugged the PSU from everything and tried turning it on to see if I had voltage, which gave me nothing but now hearing you say it needs to have a load gives me hope to try it again.
Please make a series that's dedicated to retro games on all the various computers you have. It would be cool to see you play some vintage games. Thanks and keep up the great work. I like how you let us hear the sounds of the hard drive.
It’s being a stepper motor, not a servo, it may occasionally return to the “calibration” location to eliminate any “cumulative” errors that may occur in consecutive seeking operations.
Very cool video Dave, greetings from Argentina 🇦🇷🇧🇪 in the x86 goddies pack is missing the compaq's machines and the IBM PS/2 and i am wating the video from the IBM Valuepoint machines!!!! 🇦🇷🇧🇪🇦🇷🇧🇪
I thought that 3-in-1 was not recommended for these type of things, due to containing particles of some sort. Likewise for WD40. OTOH I thought sewing machine oil (which is the same as the type used for hair clippers, I believe) was OK, because it's just pure oil without particles. Don't quote me on it, but that was my impression.
@@SilverX95 That sounds more like it to me. From what I know silicone lubricant could be way to go (just a spectator myself, but I've seen quite a bunch of these kind of vids.)
I have 3 or 4 these disks in similar condition. Bearings totally destroyed and full of BB's. Sounds like old circular saw, but yeah, they still works. In fact, today is a quite luck to find ST-412 without BB's and with not destroyed bearings.
Very nice; this is great to watch while the render bar in kdenlive goes burrrr. I just had to cancel my video release for today because of a stupid footage error that of course only got caught 20 minutes before the video went (talking about restoring an 486 EISA system).
I feel ya ... I forgot the doscember overlay in the intro but didn’t want to cancel / reupload anymore ... Rendering, uploading .... long turnaround times indeed .. they should do something about that.
@@RetroSpector78 the UA-cam editor actually used to be a lot more functional. Google removed quite a bit with the "new" studio experience :/ Out of curiosity, what do you use to archive hard disks? I ended up writing a custom utility so I could use INTERLNK/INTERSVR (or NetWare) in the future w/ a sector dump so I could run autospy to find deleted programs that might still be in the unerase tables.
I don't agree with your dismissal of -12V as being an unimportant voltage rail. You'll find it's needed to get any contemporary RS232C serial cards running which is handy for transferring files and the like. They all need +12V and -12V for the line drivers. The oddball voltage rail is the -5V. Don't think anyone built a card that used that rail so *that* can be safely ignored. 😀 Thanks for the videos and all the best for the New Year!
You’re pretty patient and determined with that harddrive! I guess it need a bit of kick starting, I don’t know if is even possible, but a drop of oil on the bearings might improve it, provided that there is a way access the bearings.
Completely sealed so not really serviceable. These things are pretty sturdy but are designed to run and not sit idle for decades in far from ideal conditions. Glad it’s running again. Best wishes for 2021 !
My 20MB IBM AT Harddrive (also full height) refused to turn with the original PSU, when I connected a modern one with probably a few more amps on the 12V line it blew a Tantalum cap and after fixing that it finally went into action, took a full minute to get to speed the only thing I ever heard that resembles it is the old air raid siren on the post office. Second spinup was a lot less dramatic, a bit disappointing. :D
@@nickwallette6201 hehe, yeah well, seems the other caps of the same type held up, and there are like 8 more of them. One day when I own a hot air station if shall do something about it, because it's all tiny rectangular SMD stuff. The lone exploded one I managed to get replaced with the iron.
i enjoy the fixing of hardware videos like this one...its educational..as far as a video just about DOS...i probably would have fallen asleep..id like to see you do an all out refurb of a computer....fixing the hardware to OS install and refurb of the case...maybe you have done that one already
Feel free to check my back catalog here on the channel ... and don’t forget to subscribe :) I don’t always have the time to do full refurbs and in this case it’s not my computer. i just offered to get it up and running again. Did another video on an IBM AT 5170 that you might like.
@@RetroSpector78 I found the 386 build video...the one with the apple logos...i guess i had already watched it because i found a comment by me in the comment section.....i have a bad memory and you make great content..dont listen to me....lol
You might want to look at finding a tool that can optimize the interleave on the drive. I had one of these exact IBM drives with the same controller that I had put in an original Compaq Portable 1, and ran an interleave optimizer on it and it increased the overall throughput 3x. For those not familiar with drive interleaving, it has to do with the speed of the stepper motor. If the stepper is moving to the next sector and it's on the next track, you want that sector to be directly under the head when it moves over. If the interleave is not properly set, the drive could have to make as much as a full rotation before the next sector is there. Slow stepper motors or slower PCs could require a higher interleave ratio. A fast drive with a fast computer can run a 1:1 interleave which means the next track does not need to have the sectors off-set. I think SpinRite can do this, but it's been a long time. Some Norton tools could also possibly do this.
A minute in, and hoping you'll restore the case. My 5150 has a few scrapes and a little corrosion on the case, so I'd be keen to see what abrasives and paint you'd use.
The stepper motor going back to track 0 is normal error recovery behaviour. If the system has problems reading or writing a sector, it assumes that maybe the stepper motor got off track by missing a step, and returns it back to track 0 to re-establish the track positions. This is called recalibration, and DOS by default retries operations multiple times with recalibration inbetween, so you always see the motor going back to track 0 several times if a bad sector is encountered.
For a minute there, I wondered if that drive was going to level off RPM-wise! I once had a Miniscribe 3650 which I believe had a bad RPM detection circuit. Sometimes the drive wouldn't spin up at all, and sometimes it sounded like it wasn't going to limit how fast it could go!!
I just got some old Seagate hard drives from Ebay. One is an ST-225 and the other is an ST-251-1. I had to take the cover off the ST-225 to manually park the heads since they do not autopark and I am waiting for a 386 motherboard to be delivered. I would love to get my hands on an ST-506 and ST-412, but they are too expensive.
The Compaq Portable I used during my freshman year of college booted off of a half dead 10MB drive with about 3mb of bad sectors. Those old drives were simultaneously fragile and incredibly robust. \
The soothing sound of a MFM hard drive booting. So times I miss those sounds. Just don't get that with modern drives. Only sounds I get from my system are the Nvidia GPU fans going crazy! 🤣🤣🤣
All those bad sectors getting mapped during low level format would have been fun waiting to complete. Tech ran on its own time then - a test of patients these days
@@RetroSpector78 that's about the size of one jpg today.My first computer had 1 G of hardrive and that was impressive today just my photos take up 11 G of HD space.
There's people that prefer SD cards in stead of hard drives, but damn they are missing out on the experience of a real hard drive especially the sound.
@@nickwallette6201 Trufax: got a socket 7 machine running off a CF-IDE adapter. I like the speed and convenience(particularly changing OS by swapping the card), but I definitely miss the drive sounds.
Anybody remember the Olivetti M24 - would be a great project, it came with the 8086 at 8MHz and was as I guess the first "faster than XT" PC. thx for the memories...
@@RetroSpector78 my first PC was a PC10 with an Emulex ESDI Controller and a 20MB Fujitsu ESDI drive - (I guess I've paid for that drive-combi alone around DM 2500.-)
No LED fans in my retro hardware bin :) but a good idea. Bought some bulky resistor acting as a load but those don’t do much obviously :) best wishes for 2021 !
Honestly I didn't hold much hope after seeing the rust on the outside of the case. That was more work to install an OS than installing Windows 95 from floppies! :-)
@@RetroSpector78 doesnt mean you shouldnt at least put a drop of oil in it just to keep it healthy long term, as you probably wont use that thing every day like it was original designed to.
Just a guess, but I suspect the servo is moving back to the start of the disk during the format to write the bad block to the File Allocation Table (FAT).
Great job. Was wondering if you could image that MS-DOS 2.11 disk and share it on archive.org or something like that. Its an English version and the only one online is German. Thanks.
You should image it with imd or image disk. Then use a program called spinrite on the disk. Both run in dos. Spinrite is a hard drive utility but it works on floppies too. It does low levell repair on disks. Find it at GRC.com. you may have a copy. Its not free but it works on all disks and hard drives from rll to ide and sata. Thx
Proper job!
One of the few channels where stuff is actually repaired and not just cleaned and claimed "FIXED AND FULL RESTORATION"
@@kreuner11 I'm merely making reference to the fact that a lot of these channels buy something and hope a bit of IPA will fix it and call it a restoration/repair
The hard drive sound is very satisfying. It was 100% worth the effort.
Indeed ! :)
'HDD starts speeding up'
Female Voice: Welcome to BLACK MESA Research Facilities. Please remain seated during the whole process...
And wouldn't it be freaky if you learnt that this very drive was used to make that very sound effect..
Great job on the troubleshooting, and you showed why it was often better to just leave systems up and running to prevent drive and stepper motors from freezing up.
For those who hated the noise in this video: I used to support hundreds of VAX workstations and mini-computers that used MFM ST-series drives. One notorious problem was a hard graphite "button" held onto the end of the spindle shaft, used to bleed off static charges as I recall. After years of continuous use the shafts would wear a dimple into the graphite and cause a very loud high-pitched shriek. Think of chalk on a blackboard but at Mach 2! We finally figured it out and were able to shift the graphite button slightly so the spindle had a fresh spot to work on. On some drives we just removed it completely (not my preferred choice). I hope that helps anyone hitting that same problem!
Thx for the detailed explanation ! Interesting stuff. Happy holidays and all the best for 2021.
I love how you woke that hard drive from what seemed death but wasn't. With lots of patience, it slowly healed. Near miraculous.
I'm impressed that such an old harddisk still works.
Wow what a trip down memory lane. I installed a LOT of these back in the day to clients of my firm. It was so funny, the sales person would interview the client, and ask "would you like a hard disk drive?". Can you even imagine? You could sell 15 of these a month a make a LOT of money. The IBM machines were really over built and bulletproof. Heavy, very heavy.
Truly impressed that the hard drive worked at the end! Thanks for another amazing video. Have a happy new year!
Thx ... u2... was a bit scared to completely ruin it but turned out well (so far)
great video! Wonderful end to DosCember. I got my first PC when I was 8yrs old. It was a SYNTREX 80286 that a neighbor handed me down. It was a 8/16mhz chip and the CMOS had a bad backup battery. I eventually got a new battery for it and then I was up late one night and I saw the advert for my PC on the Home Shopping Network on cable TV! I saw the ad and they said my PC had 1MB of RAM! I was operating with just the 640kb RAM up until this point and only at 8mhz. I went into my BIOS and switched my RAM to allow using the extended memory, added HIMEM.SYS to my startup files and now I had essentially downloaded more RAM. I also set my core clock to a massive 8mhz overclock. So I have lots of nostalgia for DOS machines. It is such a wonderful era and I am thankful that you are helping to preserve it. Happy new year ! Had to edit and add I had a 20MB western digital HDD in this PC.
My DOS experience started with a 486 so for me its all new :) great story. And best wishes for 2021 !
Mind-boggling. I remember how, almost 40 years ago, my coworkers and I stood up and looked into the hallway of our megacorporation as the IBM PC was trundled down the path to some high-powered' manager's corner office, ensconced in its cabinet and escorted by two security staff. Obviously, the manager was going to perform some computer magic and grow the company with that machine. 10 MB hard drive! I just looked over at one of my external -- run-of-the-mill -- 4 TB drives and did some mental calculations. I'd need a warehouse full of those 10 MB drives to equal the storage capacity of that cigarette package-sized 4 TB drive. I remember when I thought I had all the storage I'd need when I bought my Leading Edge XT-clone computer that came with a whopping 30 MD hard drive.
I am Just speechless and amazed with the work you do on this old machines! I admire your knowledge and your patience overcoming various obstacles!!! Keep up the good work :)
Thx a lot appreciate it ! Happy holidays and all the best for 2021 !
This reminds me how I saved my western digital hdd (21mb mfm drive).
First it had bad tantalum caps which prevented the computer from starting. After replacing them, the hdd was spinning up, then stopping.
I was about to throw the towel on it until one time it remained and was readable. So I let it run for a couple of hours that way and then it was starting ok.
However soon after it did the same thing again, so I decided to run it even longer. Since then it's been perfectly usable ^^
Sometimes these old drives just need some help to work again :D
Great to see you got that old drive running.
Me2 ... was a bit touch and go but we made it. Best wishes for 2021 !
after spending a week cleaning up a horrible ransomware infection, it's really nice to see a video like this, from a simpler time... :)
The spinning of MFM HDD is like Harley-Davidson Bikes kick starting
Sounds much better than one of those xt-ide cards :)
@@RetroSpector78 Funny enough, I was looking at a PI1541 build, and they have a little speaker to minic the real 1541 noises, and I'm thinking "this is both totally pointless, and exactly what my SD2IEC needed"
Xt ide is just a good option to test quickly softwares and other stuffs on some machines in progress but it's not a definitive solution to make a good and '' original '' restoration.
@@francoisfritz198 There's a lot of line between "period correct", and "functional in modern day". My current modern systems all got outfitted with Ethernet for getting files on and off. I know LGR uses a XT-IDE in almost all his machines to make it easy to sideload.
Sounded like a plane was right next to me lol
Nice work reviving the hard drive! I think it's very important that more attention is put into saving and maintaining old hard drives since they're often replaced with solid state solutions (which of course are much better for day to day use).
Very nice restoration! 8 bit ISA slots, MFM hard disk, and low level formats reminds me of my first computer back in my childhood in the mid 90s. That computer I had would have been a decade old then, but I valued and loved tinkering with it just as much as any new machine. I gained such a deep understanding of how PCs work. These days, if you mention a IRQ conflict to most people that work with IT, those people would be totally perplexed as to what an IRQ is.
Funny, Jan Beta is currently restoring the Commodore PC-10 matching your disk. :)
Hehe saw that yeah ... I also have a commodore pc but don’t use it much anymore. Need to pick up the pc and violently turn it 90 degrees 10 times before the hard drive starts
Fantastic. Nothing better than bringing dead hardware back to life, and that hard drive is a great example of persistence paying off!
This is a great computer history on electronic fields. Thank you for sharing this priceless treasure of information. Oh my god you have Peak Electronic test device, I met the owner in Buxton and went inside the main factory/office where they hand built these great machines. I might order one in the near future.
This is incredibly useful, seeing in detail how you revived that ST-412. :)
I'd be too scared to open it up like that, but now I'm almost looking forwards to finding a dead drive, haha.
Happy new year man, all the best for 2021. :)
That CGA card LOVES to blow up it's capacitor C8 (upper right corner). I already fixed like 3 of them for a friend.
Yes it does ... will add it to the todo list. Thx for reminding me,.
my 3.5'' fuji mfm hard drive do the same noise... sound! it also run nicely, after low level format.
your ibm series is just perfect, by your fault i have an p70 now :) and your tips about connecting a modern floppy drive help me even if the original drive recap solve the problem, thanks a lot! but now all my plasma board axial capacitors have just leaked and i wait some new ones from US, because the plasma price is just amazing and the spare is very rare.
thanks again for all of your work, take care, ''passez de bonnes fêtes de fin d'année"
Fascinating. I regret that i haven't go to Electronics university back in my youth
Thank you lol I just picked a 5160 with a 286 in and with the same power supply, not wanting to cause more damage I unplugged the PSU from everything and tried turning it on to see if I had voltage, which gave me nothing but now hearing you say it needs to have a load gives me hope to try it again.
Please make a series that's dedicated to retro games on all the various computers you have. It would be cool to see you play some vintage games. Thanks and keep up the great work. I like how you let us hear the sounds of the hard drive.
Gotta love that spin up sound. Great to see the drive made it. I too was going to suggest to oil the servo.
This computer is featured in the PC-game "Control", an agency where only ancient technology is allowed.
Need to check out that game. Thx for the tip. Happy holidays and best wishes for 2021.
@@RetroSpector78 thank you! The same goes for you and your family - all the best! :-)
Quickly becoming one of my fave Retro tech channels!
Thx a lot ... appreciate it ! Wish you all the best for 2021.
@@RetroSpector78 likewise, see you in 2021 🙂
Again a very instructional video... Keep e'm up...
Stay tuned in 2021 ! Best wishes.
Imagine trying to tease a modern pc back to life like this. Built like tanks those old machines.
It’s being a stepper motor, not a servo, it may occasionally return to the “calibration” location to eliminate any “cumulative” errors that may occur in consecutive seeking operations.
Thanks for the video. Our first PC was an XT machine so great to see it working again. Best wishes and God bless you for 2021.
Very cool video Dave, greetings from Argentina 🇦🇷🇧🇪 in the x86 goddies pack is missing the compaq's machines and the IBM PS/2 and i am wating the video from the IBM Valuepoint machines!!!! 🇦🇷🇧🇪🇦🇷🇧🇪
It will come soon ... have a little bit more time now ... but there’s also the holidays so ... will do my best.
@@RetroSpector78 happy new year 2021 from Argentina 🇦🇷🇧🇪
Thanks for a great year of videos.
You spent way more time with that hard drive than I would have!
I'm impressed you managed to get the bad sectors down to 61k.
Old harddrives are a work of art
Did you try putting some sewing machine (3 in 1) oil in the drive motor? That usually helps
came here to suggest this
If bearing are a little dry, but if a leak in motor will have oil over the platters - not good.
I thought that 3-in-1 was not recommended for these type of things, due to containing particles of some sort. Likewise for WD40. OTOH I thought sewing machine oil (which is the same as the type used for hair clippers, I believe) was OK, because it's just pure oil without particles. Don't quote me on it, but that was my impression.
@@doublehappiness9889 i wonder if pure synthetic oil would be better for these drives
@@SilverX95 That sounds more like it to me. From what I know silicone lubricant could be way to go (just a spectator myself, but I've seen quite a bunch of these kind of vids.)
This brings back memories 10meg hdd insane.. this is what started me in information technology professional path... except Hewlett Packard X T and AT
16:28 -- damn that thing sounds like a race car
Compare that to your average compact flash card :)
@@RetroSpector78 absolutely ZERO sound...
@@RetroSpector78 which is yet another reason I was gonna do the CF to IDE adapter in my gateway 510t build and this dosbox I got the other day
Excellent resurrection of the poor old hard drive. It was wonderful to see. I hope it will improve further. 🧨🎉👍
AH THE WONDERFUL SOUNDS OF OLD HARDWARE WORKING
I have 3 or 4 these disks in similar condition. Bearings totally destroyed and full of BB's. Sounds like old circular saw, but yeah, they still works. In fact, today is a quite luck to find ST-412 without BB's and with not destroyed bearings.
Love this, thank you, you've given me some hope that I can resurrect some old Seagate's and XTs I have....just need to find some time!
I have in my 286 PC a 100% Working 20 MB MFM HDD THank you for that video.
You’re welcome.
That hard drive sounded like a jet engine initially.... whew! :-D
Hehe.. they don’t make them like that anymore that’s for sure ! :)
That HD starting up was legitimately terrifying
Very nice; this is great to watch while the render bar in kdenlive goes burrrr. I just had to cancel my video release for today because of a stupid footage error that of course only got caught 20 minutes before the video went (talking about restoring an 486 EISA system).
I feel ya ... I forgot the doscember overlay in the intro but didn’t want to cancel / reupload anymore ... Rendering, uploading .... long turnaround times indeed .. they should do something about that.
@@RetroSpector78 the UA-cam editor actually used to be a lot more functional. Google removed quite a bit with the "new" studio experience :/
Out of curiosity, what do you use to archive hard disks? I ended up writing a custom utility so I could use INTERLNK/INTERSVR (or NetWare) in the future w/ a sector dump so I could run autospy to find deleted programs that might still be in the unerase tables.
I don't agree with your dismissal of -12V as being an unimportant voltage rail. You'll find it's needed to get any contemporary RS232C serial cards running which is handy for transferring files and the like. They all need +12V and -12V for the line drivers. The oddball voltage rail is the -5V. Don't think anyone built a card that used that rail so *that* can be safely ignored. 😀 Thanks for the videos and all the best for the New Year!
great sound of the hard disk spinning up
i did definitely enjoy this video - that annoying hard disk sound is wonderful - thank you!
You’re pretty patient and determined with that harddrive! I guess it need a bit of kick starting, I don’t know if is even possible, but a drop of oil on the bearings might improve it, provided that there is a way access the bearings.
Completely sealed so not really serviceable. These things are pretty sturdy but are designed to run and not sit idle for decades in far from ideal conditions. Glad it’s running again. Best wishes for 2021 !
needs lubricant as well :[
About the HDD motor: the Li-2 airplane that lives at my hometown's small airport gives a similar, though beefed up, sound at startup... :)
And it can probably also carry 27 360kb floppies worth of storage :)
@@RetroSpector78 Actually I'm a bit afraid that the Li-2 cannot store bits and bytes. :D
@@RetroSpector78 The Li-2 was the Soviet version of the DC-3 built under licence.
@@RetroSpector78 interesting info 😊
Amazing that you got the HD to work - really didn’t seem it would! Good quality stuff after all.👍
27:16 i looked away for a minute and thought a motorcycle was going by my house LOL
The hard drive reminds me of my first Pc starting. A 286-12 with a full hight 40mb MFM.
IBM AT ? Or clone ?
My 20MB IBM AT Harddrive (also full height) refused to turn with the original PSU, when I connected a modern one with probably a few more amps on the 12V line it blew a Tantalum cap and after fixing that it finally went into action, took a full minute to get to speed the only thing I ever heard that resembles it is the old air raid siren on the post office. Second spinup was a lot less dramatic, a bit disappointing. :D
Only so many times it can repeat that performance before it runs out of caps, eh?
@@nickwallette6201 hehe, yeah well, seems the other caps of the same type held up, and there are like 8 more of them. One day when I own a hot air station if shall do something about it, because it's all tiny rectangular SMD stuff. The lone exploded one I managed to get replaced with the iron.
i enjoy the fixing of hardware videos like this one...its educational..as far as a video just about DOS...i probably would have fallen asleep..id like to see you do an all out refurb of a computer....fixing the hardware to OS install and refurb of the case...maybe you have done that one already
Feel free to check my back catalog here on the channel ... and don’t forget to subscribe :) I don’t always have the time to do full refurbs and in this case it’s not my computer. i just offered to get it up and running again. Did another video on an IBM AT 5170 that you might like.
there were certain sections where I changed the youtube playback speed to 1.75.
@@RetroSpector78 i have subbed...ill look for that 5170 videp
@@RetroSpector78 I found the 386 build video...the one with the apple logos...i guess i had already watched it because i found a comment by me in the comment section.....i have a bad memory and you make great content..dont listen to me....lol
That PC is playing the real version of RUST
You might want to look at finding a tool that can optimize the interleave on the drive. I had one of these exact IBM drives with the same controller that I had put in an original Compaq Portable 1, and ran an interleave optimizer on it and it increased the overall throughput 3x. For those not familiar with drive interleaving, it has to do with the speed of the stepper motor. If the stepper is moving to the next sector and it's on the next track, you want that sector to be directly under the head when it moves over. If the interleave is not properly set, the drive could have to make as much as a full rotation before the next sector is there. Slow stepper motors or slower PCs could require a higher interleave ratio. A fast drive with a fast computer can run a 1:1 interleave which means the next track does not need to have the sectors off-set. I think SpinRite can do this, but it's been a long time. Some Norton tools could also possibly do this.
A minute in, and hoping you'll restore the case. My 5150 has a few scrapes and a little corrosion on the case, so I'd be keen to see what abrasives and paint you'd use.
1:30 Somebody actually attempted to plug that thing in and turn it on..?? Whew. I don’t know if that’s brave or foolish, or maybe both! Haha
Great perseverance on that HD!
The stepper motor going back to track 0 is normal error recovery behaviour. If the system has problems reading or writing a sector, it assumes that maybe the stepper motor got off track by missing a step, and returns it back to track 0 to re-establish the track positions. This is called recalibration, and DOS by default retries operations multiple times with recalibration inbetween, so you always see the motor going back to track 0 several times if a bad sector is encountered.
Nice work, Happy New Year to ALL from Karachi, Pakistan
Oil the head and disk steppers. They are probably full of dried oil and fluff. Just a very light grade oil (sewing machine for example).
For a minute there, I wondered if that drive was going to level off RPM-wise! I once had a Miniscribe 3650 which I believe had a bad RPM detection circuit. Sometimes the drive wouldn't spin up at all, and sometimes it sounded like it wasn't going to limit how fast it could go!!
From when I owned a PCjr, I used to have a full copy of PC DOS 2.10, with the manual (it was a binder and the disks were in a "page" at the back).
I just got some old Seagate hard drives from Ebay. One is an ST-225 and the other is an ST-251-1. I had to take the cover off the ST-225 to manually park the heads since they do not autopark and I am waiting for a 386 motherboard to be delivered. I would love to get my hands on an ST-506 and ST-412, but they are too expensive.
These were listed as working? I had a PS/2 386 model 50 stopped working pulled the CPU out - some pins had Rusted off.
Great video, love those old Seagates! did your's have a bad track label on it?
Wow nice work. I suppose that the lube on the hdd was just to old. 👍 happy new year
The Compaq Portable I used during my freshman year of college booted off of a half dead 10MB drive with about 3mb of bad sectors. Those old drives were simultaneously fragile and incredibly robust.
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Great video. Are you going to make another for cleaning it up?
Been thinking about letting the owner do the cleaning. I’ll ask some pictures and post them here :)
@@RetroSpector78 The case probably need respraying. I suggest purple. A purple XT would look absolutely smashing. :P
The soothing sound of a MFM hard drive booting. So times I miss those sounds. Just don't get that with modern drives. Only sounds I get from my system are the Nvidia GPU fans going crazy! 🤣🤣🤣
Nice job. I would guess that took you 40 hours :) Happy New Year!
All those bad sectors getting mapped during low level format would have been fun waiting to complete. Tech ran on its own time then - a test of patients these days
back then when 256K of memory was very impressive.
Amazing what you could run back then on 256kb. Best wishes for 2021 !
@@RetroSpector78 that's about the size of one jpg today.My first computer had 1 G of hardrive and that was impressive today just my photos take up 11 G of HD space.
Nowadays, many call HDDs as "spinning rust"... Well, THIS is a spinning rust. :)
There's people that prefer SD cards in stead of hard drives, but damn they are missing out on the experience of a real hard drive especially the sound.
Totally agree. If you want fast and non-cantankerous, then why are you fiddling with XTs? ;-)
@@nickwallette6201 Trufax: got a socket 7 machine running off a CF-IDE adapter. I like the speed and convenience(particularly changing OS by swapping the card), but I definitely miss the drive sounds.
I remember the first gui I used was a DOS executable named “List” which was basically a spartan file explorer
Anybody remember the Olivetti M24 - would be a great project, it came with the 8086 at 8MHz and was as I guess the first "faster than XT" PC. thx for the memories...
I’ve got the M19
@@RetroSpector78 my first PC was a PC10 with an Emulex ESDI Controller and a 20MB Fujitsu ESDI drive - (I guess I've paid for that drive-combi alone around DM 2500.-)
sounds like a car love the sound
I used to just remove c56 and 58 after having them both blow into my armpit while reaching over the computer. Scared the crap out of me😂
An alternative method for testing a power supply from one of these computers is to connect a LED fan, might be better than risking a HDD.
No LED fans in my retro hardware bin :) but a good idea. Bought some bulky resistor acting as a load but those don’t do much obviously :) best wishes for 2021 !
Great work!
Honestly I didn't hold much hope after seeing the rust on the outside of the case. That was more work to install an OS than installing Windows 95 from floppies! :-)
"...this wonderful sound of the hard drive spinning up."
Hard drive: "wwwwwwwWWWWWWRRRRRR SCREEEEEEEEEEEEE"
The earliest MS-DOS I had was 3.3. It was on an Amstrad 286 PC.
Sorry for my ignorance but what year this PC comes from? Thank you
IBM PC XT was released in March 8, 1983. This one was probably from 85/86.
That hard drive sounds like a motorcycle :))
Is it possible to replace Tantal capacitors with electrolytic capacitors?
lube the drive motor and the stepper motor as well. That drive NEEDS it.
Drive motor is sealed and cannot be lubed as far as I know. Stepper motor seems to be working really well....
@@RetroSpector78 doesnt mean you shouldnt at least put a drop of oil in it just to keep it healthy long term, as you probably wont use that thing every day like it was original designed to.
Just a guess, but I suspect the servo is moving back to the start of the disk during the format to write the bad block to the File Allocation Table (FAT).
I have a copy of MS-DOS 2.11 from Olivetti. Is it gonna run only on Olivetti PCs?
Great job. Was wondering if you could image that MS-DOS 2.11 disk and share it on archive.org or something like that. Its an
English version and the only one online is German. Thanks.
I was planning to but a couple of files cannot be read anymore. Also reached out to some people if they had the english version but no luck so far.
You should image it with imd or image disk. Then use a program called spinrite on the disk. Both run in dos. Spinrite is a hard drive utility but it works on floppies too. It does low levell repair on disks. Find it at GRC.com. you may have a copy. Its not free but it works on all disks and hard drives from rll to ide and sata. Thx
@@RetroSpector78 hi can you copy the command.com file from the disk. I found a way to mod the German version. Thx
Are there any updates on The Unfixable Videocard From Неll? :)
Try Sonax Full Effect Wheel Cleaner on the rust...be forewarned, though; it's very expensive.
nice roaarr from the HDD
That PC was revolting. But nice video.
Thx ... appreciate it. Best wishes for 2021.
Bravo !
nice hd work
Thx ... was pretty sure it was toast to be honest :) glad to see it running again.
nice seeing old tech live
Indeed. Best wishes for 2021 !