Brand doesn't matter imo. Even some uninsulated stranded wire can wick solder. Not super well but it can do it. But some do contain flux in it, which I guess would matter
Tip for if you go back to the scrapyard; if you pick up harddisks again, try to find 2 of the same type so you could swap pcbs/components. I think you're able to find multiples of the same drives since they were so widely available. :)
@@bitsundboltsSure as heck is. I have already recovered some data from a dead Seagate because I had two identical drives so I could switch the PCB. But I was lucky since it was only the electronics that failed, much more often it's the mechanical parts...
That is good advice. I myself did a PCB swap of a HDD once. It was brand new, but a SMD component fell off due to a manufacturing defect. As the platters were still intact I was able to restore my data swapping the PCB out for that of another drive of the same brand and type. Obviously, I never bought a drive of that brand and type again.
I'm really shocked you actually did get it working, the connector wasn't what I thought would do it but that chip looked absolutely screwed. Expert repair. I'm curious to see what the platters look like, there might be some head crashes. Your macro lens is fine honestly, the quality is pretty good up close on the chip like that, interested to see what the new one would be like though
I was amazed seeing the Conner drive report to the BIOS :) Thanks for thinking this is an expert repair - because I am definitely not an expert. I just have a lot of patience! It could be that some heads are damaged due to excessive shocks. I am curious about the new microscope camera as well. It was quite expensive and I am curious if I will be able to improve the quality. It is NOT a cheapo camera (550 USD after discount - original price was 720 USD). I took advantage of November 11 sales. Why did I spend so much money on it? It allows me to stream directly via USB (no need for HDMI cable). It also supports 4K, wireless data transfer, has a 1/1.2" sensor, etc. I hope this to be an investment for the future!
I do have 11 other hard drives from last weeks visit :) - but then there are also many other videos I want to finalize. I'll try to mix them up a bit. Thanks for watching!
Honestly, there's little to be lost by opening the drive physically in a clean environment, and making sure there is no obstruction of the heads or the motor spindle. You can't really make it worse from the physical point of view. Btw, I have the boards I mentioned a while ago to replace the very hot linear regulator on the voodoo 3 now; I'll be testing them soon and if they don't catch on fire I can arrange to ship you one.
I will open the drive eventually. I am interested in seeing the inside of the drive - and I am sure others would like to see it too. The drive is quite heavy. If I am not mistaken, this drive has 3 platters (6 heads).
@hicknopunk8314 I'll try to make something like that. Would be a fun project to make a tiny cleanroom in some sort of a cardboard box with filtering the air (circulation) etc. Not sure if I am getting ahead of myself 😂
A) Amazing repair. I figured you had no chance in hell of getting the PCB to work. B) Try a Linux or FreeBSD environment (FreeBSD install media can do a liveCD, and Linux has the excellent SystemRescueCD project). You'll get much more detailed diagnostic messages in syslog, and command line actions like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" can be used to do a whole-drive sequential write, while "dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null" can be used to do a whole-drive sequential read. That drive *might* actually have SMART tables you can query too.
I'll give it another try with some more tools. If you don't hear anything about this drive anymore, then I was not able to get any further. But interesting that there is still a lot of knowledge about spinning disks out there! Great! And thanks for the details!
There is also GNU ddrescue, a more advanced tool that continues even when it encounters errors and can build a map of problematic areas. You can run the tool many times using the map, and try accessing the problem areas with different settings applied.
And on Linux , with hdparm you can slow the rotation speed, and other performance settings. It often helped me saving disks contents when I worked as a sys admin in the 2000,s, for example rescuing a dead drive for a customer with important configuration settings no one remembered how to replicate :) It took more then one day and one night to read this disk, but I finally managed to clone it.
A fun story: I also have a Conner drive I been trying my all to get running again and pretty much also drove me crazy trying. The fact that my drive also have been working and just been stored makes it even more annoying. it have developed the click of death when trying to access the drive at all, however it spins up and self test normally every time but then always fail in every aspect. I can make one computer detect it enough but it only shows it has 2 sectors total and fails to do anything but clicking, clicking and clicking. I given up on it how sad it is to do so. My guess is either "cluster rot" making the initiation fail, or Head crash due to either stiction or bearing wobble from storing. But I at least have more Conners that still work. But hey, I am sad for losing a single drive, Just imagine how I feel when I see that HUGE MOUNTAIN of trashed drives on the ground! I wish I also could go dig in that pile but I live in flippin Sweden 😭
there seems to be a very marginal capacitor or two in there. they charge, and let you go further, but then discharge too far and error you out. that's my hunch here.
So many HDDs... It was funny when I arrived at the "shop" to look for drives: There were bags full of them. The guys there are really friendly and allowed me to be in one corner filtering through the drives, but they do treat those hard drives like potatoes :D Bag upside down and pull on the edges. Horror for anyone who loves hard drives!
It's sad how old computers are treated. They still perform their intended functions and run their software perfectly today. Unlike modern machines with parts of the software stored in the cloud, or Apple policies that make 5 year old systems break capability so you end up with beautiful paperweights on your desk.
There is a serial console available for diagnostics on the J4 header pins at the PCB. I think you can trace it back to the CPU which is the 68HC11 chip ( U10, house marked SC415016AFU) Dumping the ROM might show you the list of commands.
Really seems to me like a cracked solder joint on a component causing flaky behavior. And while it's probably not the cause, i'd go and replace all the tantalums on the underside of that drive just to make sure you have caps within spec going to everything... Honestly, baking the board might be the way to go in this case.
I will check the PCB once more and see if I can see anything that I may have missed before. Might be an interesting candidate to test the preheating station that is arriving in the next couple of days.
I think before baking the board I'd want to go over the rest of the chips on the board to check they haven't had a pin broken free from its pad, also checking the discretes to make sure they're all present and not cracked or missing.
I agree with a few other commenters. Check the circuit board for bad solder joints and shorted components. The media sounds like it's working. There is some hidden damage from the impact.
Give it a try with HDAT2 (free DOS software, and a must have tool to test and refurbish storage media). Try to run multiple wipes and then run a surface scan. Perhaps you can get some more life out of it. The freezer method only has a minimal sucess rate when heads are stuck to the platter and the disc doesn't spin. If the disc spins, freezing the disk will not help.
I have not tested HDAT2. It is available on the "Ultimate Boot CD". I will give it a try. I have never "performed" the freezer trick, but good to know that chances are limited - thanks!
Congratulations on successful PCB repair! Unfortuneatly seems that drive have bad surface, heads or preamplifier. Could be used as spares source for even more advanced drive repairs in future. It is sad how many unique hard drives get discarded. There will never be more such hard drives manufactured for retro computers to use.
I played around with SpinRite on another drive. Unfortunately, it seems like SpinRite requires a partitioned drive to work. So far, I couldn't make SpinRite detect the drive.
Honestly with a Conner drive it got a lot further than I anticipated. Even back in the day I had no success with connor drives. Our 486 from Packard Bell came with a Connor 170MB drive. And within the first year of owning the machine the drive failed and we had to get Packard Bell to replace it. The replaced Connor drive died in a week. Thinking it was something wrong with the computer, we took the whole machine in to be worked on. Machine was fine. Next Connor drive failed in a month. Fourth drive replacement that they did was a Seagate and it didn't have problems for the rest of the time we had the machine.
Get a usb to ide cable when you go back and a usb a to c adapter so you can connect drives to your phone as a quick test the smaller drives normally work without ext power but the full size drives might work with a battery bank.
I do have one of those universal IDE (40/44) and SATA to USB converters. 2.5" drives spin up and I was able to identify some broken ones (clicking, not spinning up, horrible scratching noises). I think about 80% of the drives at that place are DEAD. Chances are totally against you. Larger drives won't spin up as far as I am aware (without a proper 12V external power supply).
Geile Sache, dass alle Pins wieder angeschlossen werden konnten und die Elektronik lebt. Ich würde HDD Regenerator im Scan Mode und DBAN testen. IBM Drive Fitness Test und eventuell Seatools könnten auch etwas beitragen. Ansonsten aufschrauben und das Innenleben beleuchten.
Ich werde mal die ganzen Tools die jetzt nochmal in den Kommentaren genannten wurden, testen. War auch überrascht, dass die Elektronik noch funktioniert.
It may be worth replacing the larger electrolytic capacitors on the board (the yellow with red stripe, and i think theres a couble black ones), those style of surface mount caps are notoriously troublemakers for things like the sega game gear, and i had two that were bad in an old bad drive
Alas, pretty much the outcome I expected. I had no doubt you would be able to fix the board since you're really good at this, but I would have been very surprised if the internals would still have been OK. Conner drives weren't exactly reliable to begin with (are there even any known working ones left at this point? 😅) and the age and harsh treatment at the recycler didn't improve the odds, either. It sure was worth a shot though! I don't think cooling or heating will help in this case, as the actuator noise doesn't sound quite right to me. It's also worth a shot though of course. It isn't much extra effort and It's broken already, so it can't get any worse. Maybe some hardened grease loosens, some tolerances line up better or a capacitor value improves as it warms up, as the situation improved the longer it was running. I don''t see any electrolytic caps though. Ultimately, you should have a look inside, maybe you/we can at least learn what the cause of the remaining issue was. Regarding the image quality, I think it's perfectly fine as it is, you could have spared the expense. Higher quality will of course still be nice though. Already looking forward to more Voodoo content! ♥
Suspect there is some physical shock damage to the heads or arm. Your soldering footage is great though, nice and clear. It's good to practice on stuff like this, there might even be life in this drive... would be curious to see if there's anything obviously wrong and fixable under the cover.
I managed to get quite a few "scrap" 1TB SATA drives back in the day - they came from a huge server farm and it appeared the majority of them worked fine. I learnt later that the IT staff had pulled the incorrect drives when the array flagged a failure. Sadly the supply was short lived as they invested in a bulk eraser that wiped all info off the disk - including the geometry settings. The effort to revive them was no longer worth it.
I have seen hard drives in their original, sealed packaging. Dell hard drives, never installed in any system! There were at least 10 brand new drives. But they were for servers (SAS connector).
@@bitsundbolts I have quite a few of those as well - I think it was due to the use case. Enterprise bought a surplus of drives to enable hot swapping and when the server is decommissioned those spares go with it! Sadly in the UK WEEE laws require businesses to dispose of ewaste in a documented way - no more "dumpster diving"!
You can try ddrescue or similar software to check what areas of the drive could be read. Then maybe it could be possible to partition it around damaged space.
Physical damage on a hard drive sound fatal to the heads inside. I think they're still able to move to certain locations but fail to deliver any data from the disks. Guess if you were to stick the board onto another drive that has failed electronics it could work again with this board.
Agreed. I will keep the PCB. The internals of the drive were probably damaged long time ago or because of the mishandling at the scrapyard. But I am going to give it another try. There are many suggestions I want to try.
By the sound of the drive the platter motor bearing is on its way out and this is enough to wobble the platter enough to not be able to work reliably. Try putting the drive upside down on the table or on its side and see if this changes anything.
Hi Bits und Bolts. I enjoy all your videos. They are fantastic. I have a question. Have you try HDD LLF Low Level Format Tool? For a low level format of the drive i mean. I have a similar best place in my town, but is rare to go there, because take me a lot of time to dig there. Anyway. I hope you can recover it. Continue with the good work.
Thank you! I'll continue to make videos and hope they're going to be even better in the future. I have not tested any other software yet that wasn't in this video. I'll put it on the list and see if other tools may have more success with this drive. Thanks for watching!
Coming soon! I am in Germany right now. There should be a Voodoo 2 with blown up memory chips... I have seen the pictures - SPECTACULAR! This will be a fun one! And yes, there is still the Diamond Monster 3D and a Voodoo 3 2000 with screw driver marks on the chip (heatsink is still glued on).
I wouldn't be surprised if it was. Those drives from the scrapyard have been treated badly. They are thrown around like brick stones. Well, it is their final destination.
I'd be interested to know what happens to these old drives at the facility. Do components get removed from boards, are valuable materials recovered - gold, copper, aluminium, etc - or does it all go in a giant machine that compacts and/or shreds it, and then it all goes in landfill?
They do mostly separation of individual parts. Plastic from metal, electronics from Disk platters, etc. then the separated parts are moved somewhere else for recovery. I do not believe there is anything that goes to landfills
I would have a try with a factory tool, in case it can low level format and initialise the drive. I did not find anything related to Conner, but at least The Retro Web seems to have Seagate format utility. It might be able to recognise the drive, as Seagate acquired Conner at some point.
Nice work even though there was only a very small chance it would work correctly after such an impact. Still, good practice for your leg-bending skills :)
I suppose in the end it's good practice. Personally I'm not a fan of hard drives so I don't think there is a reason to put too much effort in them. I've thought about taking apart a 2019 laptop that failed after 2 months of use. Just for SMD practice. I've never done it before. Anyway.....it was ugly, but it apparently did the trick. I don't think it would have shown up otherwise.
Before using higher level software to work with partitions, try scanning surface by MHDD or Victoria DOS software. If reading failes, first run full erase scan. Maybe HDAT2 will also do the trick.
@@bitsundbolts yes, those programms don't care about logical content, those print sector access time. If harddrive has issues, access time will be higher ("green" and "red" sectors), if there are unreadable ("bad") blocks - those will be displayed as well. Sometimes bad blocks are of software kind and can be fixed by rewriting them. That's why full write scan could help. Writing will not fix hardware bad sectors though. But it can force harddrive to remap those to reserved space (depends on a firmware). You can can view SMART there and see if Reallocated sector count grows or not. One note: you may need older MHDD versions (like 2.60) to properly scan older drives (
The sound of the heads feels to me a bit strange. Could be a connection issue somewhere that doesn't prevent the drive to be detected, but not working properly. Could be the case?
Yes, it could be. But it does access parts of platters. I can read and write the boot track. And I managed to install ez-drive (also create the partition). I'll probably leave the drive for now. I have a lot of other drives from which I may learn more...
That is a great repair, and a beautiful drive, even if it doesn't work. Have you tried making a smaller partition, only until right before the rest of the process fails, and ignoring the rest of the space? I'm using some HDDs like this, the space available to me is smaller but at least they work.
The EZ partition was successfully created. It is a very tiny portion on the drive. You might be right that this may work, but only for a very tiny portion. I will try a few other tools and also see if small partitions may work somehow.
I've read wikipedia article about Victoria HDD testing utility some time ago, it says that program has an easter egg: if Conner Technology CT204 is connected it displays "Conner?! And where you found that yuck?" message at the bottom. You can try it with your drive too xD Dunno if it about Victoria for DOS or Victoria for windows tho.
Connor drives are a *bit* better than Kalok drives, which means I wouldn't even bother with it - they're loud, slow, and mechanically unreliable. If this was a Quantum or a Seagate, I'd spend some time, but never on a Connor.
If it was for free , i try to dismount the drive , the other thing is lubricate the drive, i think if i was me i tried to lubricate the drive, because no more has to be done .
Why did you even bother wasting your time repairing the IDE connector and chip. It obviously had a significant impact so was never going to work. Im surprised the BIOS detected it at all. When you open it, the heads will be damaged and the platters will be scratched.
A guy on YT makes chips at home (1000 to 10000 transistor) but making a HDD? If it could be spun up, clean itself and then told when to go you might be able to make a HDD at home if no chips are complex.
I said it like that because I get a feeling there's something wrong inside the platter. It was a joke lol I don't even understand what kind of gear you would need to begin the process of making the platter and arm thingies inside.
Honestly this is less about having a working drive and more about the process of performing the repair. The skills and work environment (tools and microscope) he's developing here might help him save more interesting hardware down the road.
Yes, that is exactly why this repair is useful to me. Even though the drive doesn't work, I practiced on the chip, did some troubleshooting, and achieved a tiny success. At least the drive reported for duty one last time... My electronics understanding is very very limited, but I do notice that I learn over time. There is little use of those disks and the hardware in general - except for nostalgia.
Hey, what is that copper braid you use to desolder? Is there a specific recommendation?
Hello! I am using TOWOT Solder Wick. So far, I am quite happy with it. Maybe others have good wick suggestions as well.
Brand doesn't matter imo. Even some uninsulated stranded wire can wick solder. Not super well but it can do it.
But some do contain flux in it, which I guess would matter
Tip for if you go back to the scrapyard; if you pick up harddisks again, try to find 2 of the same type so you could swap pcbs/components. I think you're able to find multiples of the same drives since they were so widely available. :)
I'll definitely keep the PCB. I also kept it from the Quantum GoDrive. You are right, it might come in handy one day.
@@bitsundboltsSure as heck is. I have already recovered some data from a dead Seagate because I had two identical drives so I could switch the PCB.
But I was lucky since it was only the electronics that failed, much more often it's the mechanical parts...
That is good advice. I myself did a PCB swap of a HDD once. It was brand new, but a SMD component fell off due to a manufacturing defect. As the platters were still intact I was able to restore my data swapping the PCB out for that of another drive of the same brand and type. Obviously, I never bought a drive of that brand and type again.
Even head swaps on older drives are quite trivial.
I'm a sucker for hard drives. I'm ringing that notification bell for this channel from now on.
You'll not be disappointed! I have plenty of old drives left. I also want to try a few raid configurations with some drives (
You did very well to even get it recognised in BIOS. Those very evident impact forces clearly damaged the head assembly & platters!
Thank you! Well, I tried my luck and wasn't successful. But it was still a fun project 😊
I'm really shocked you actually did get it working, the connector wasn't what I thought would do it but that chip looked absolutely screwed. Expert repair. I'm curious to see what the platters look like, there might be some head crashes.
Your macro lens is fine honestly, the quality is pretty good up close on the chip like that, interested to see what the new one would be like though
I was amazed seeing the Conner drive report to the BIOS :) Thanks for thinking this is an expert repair - because I am definitely not an expert. I just have a lot of patience! It could be that some heads are damaged due to excessive shocks.
I am curious about the new microscope camera as well. It was quite expensive and I am curious if I will be able to improve the quality. It is NOT a cheapo camera (550 USD after discount - original price was 720 USD). I took advantage of November 11 sales. Why did I spend so much money on it? It allows me to stream directly via USB (no need for HDMI cable). It also supports 4K, wireless data transfer, has a 1/1.2" sensor, etc. I hope this to be an investment for the future!
The platters will be ruined.
@@simontay4851 it can't be more ruined than it already is
Too bad it didn't work but that is a great repair! Well done!
Awesome video, I never thought that I would find this topic interesting but I do!
And instead of bits and bolts this can be called the adventures of Alex.
This was awesome, i'd totally watch more repairs like this. Hopefully with some success!
I do have 11 other hard drives from last weeks visit :) - but then there are also many other videos I want to finalize. I'll try to mix them up a bit. Thanks for watching!
The real value is practice bending pins haha. And hearing the 30 year old HDD spinning one more time is a nice bonus
At least you got some good soldering practice out of it.
Honestly, there's little to be lost by opening the drive physically in a clean environment, and making sure there is no obstruction of the heads or the motor spindle.
You can't really make it worse from the physical point of view.
Btw, I have the boards I mentioned a while ago to replace the very hot linear regulator on the voodoo 3 now; I'll be testing them soon and if they don't catch on fire I can arrange to ship you one.
I do that using a film processing bag as my kinda clean room. It often lets you at least pull the data.
I will open the drive eventually. I am interested in seeing the inside of the drive - and I am sure others would like to see it too. The drive is quite heavy. If I am not mistaken, this drive has 3 platters (6 heads).
@hicknopunk8314 I'll try to make something like that. Would be a fun project to make a tiny cleanroom in some sort of a cardboard box with filtering the air (circulation) etc. Not sure if I am getting ahead of myself 😂
@@bitsundbolts since you won't do film, get a clear bag.
A) Amazing repair. I figured you had no chance in hell of getting the PCB to work.
B) Try a Linux or FreeBSD environment (FreeBSD install media can do a liveCD, and Linux has the excellent SystemRescueCD project). You'll get much more detailed diagnostic messages in syslog, and command line actions like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda" can be used to do a whole-drive sequential write, while "dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null" can be used to do a whole-drive sequential read. That drive *might* actually have SMART tables you can query too.
I'll give it another try with some more tools. If you don't hear anything about this drive anymore, then I was not able to get any further. But interesting that there is still a lot of knowledge about spinning disks out there! Great! And thanks for the details!
There is also GNU ddrescue, a more advanced tool that continues even when it encounters errors and can build a map of problematic areas. You can run the tool many times using the map, and try accessing the problem areas with different settings applied.
I'll give it a try
And on Linux , with hdparm you can slow the rotation speed, and other performance settings.
It often helped me saving disks contents when I worked as a sys admin in the 2000,s, for example rescuing a dead drive for a customer with important configuration settings no one remembered how to replicate :)
It took more then one day and one night to read this disk, but I finally managed to clone it.
A fun story: I also have a Conner drive I been trying my all to get running again and pretty much also drove me crazy trying. The fact that my drive also have been working and just been stored makes it even more annoying. it have developed the click of death when trying to access the drive at all, however it spins up and self test normally every time but then always fail in every aspect. I can make one computer detect it enough but it only shows it has 2 sectors total and fails to do anything but clicking, clicking and clicking. I given up on it how sad it is to do so. My guess is either "cluster rot" making the initiation fail, or Head crash due to either stiction or bearing wobble from storing. But I at least have more Conners that still work. But hey, I am sad for losing a single drive, Just imagine how I feel when I see that HUGE MOUNTAIN of trashed drives on the ground! I wish I also could go dig in that pile but I live in flippin Sweden 😭
Best thing to do with this drive is participating in an retro hard disk throwing contest!😁
there seems to be a very marginal capacitor or two in there. they charge, and let you go further, but then discharge too far and error you out. that's my hunch here.
Hard drive heaven.
So many HDDs... It was funny when I arrived at the "shop" to look for drives: There were bags full of them. The guys there are really friendly and allowed me to be in one corner filtering through the drives, but they do treat those hard drives like potatoes :D Bag upside down and pull on the edges. Horror for anyone who loves hard drives!
It's sad how old computers are treated. They still perform their intended functions and run their software perfectly today. Unlike modern machines with parts of the software stored in the cloud, or Apple policies that make 5 year old systems break capability so you end up with beautiful paperweights on your desk.
If you have a working drive of the same type, take the platters out and also check them from stuck headpiece aka make sure they are clean and clear.
I wish I could do that, but that exceeds my capabilities by far.
Good Job!
There is a serial console available for diagnostics on the J4 header pins at the PCB.
I think you can trace it back to the CPU which is the 68HC11 chip ( U10, house marked SC415016AFU)
Dumping the ROM might show you the list of commands.
Really seems to me like a cracked solder joint on a component causing flaky behavior. And while it's probably not the cause, i'd go and replace all the tantalums on the underside of that drive just to make sure you have caps within spec going to everything... Honestly, baking the board might be the way to go in this case.
I will check the PCB once more and see if I can see anything that I may have missed before. Might be an interesting candidate to test the preheating station that is arriving in the next couple of days.
@@bitsundbolts let us know if any results!
I think before baking the board I'd want to go over the rest of the chips on the board to check they haven't had a pin broken free from its pad, also checking the discretes to make sure they're all present and not cracked or missing.
I agree with a few other commenters. Check the circuit board for bad solder joints and shorted components. The media sounds like it's working. There is some hidden damage from the impact.
I will have another look at the PCB! 👍
Makes me think of a missing capacitor, broken off the board. That would explain inconsistent results. Check their solder connections too.
I'll give it another try. Could be that I have missed something on the PCB.
Give it a try with HDAT2 (free DOS software, and a must have tool to test and refurbish storage media). Try to run multiple wipes and then run a surface scan. Perhaps you can get some more life out of it.
The freezer method only has a minimal sucess rate when heads are stuck to the platter and the disc doesn't spin. If the disc spins, freezing the disk will not help.
I have not tested HDAT2. It is available on the "Ultimate Boot CD". I will give it a try. I have never "performed" the freezer trick, but good to know that chances are limited - thanks!
Congratulations on successful PCB repair! Unfortuneatly seems that drive have bad surface, heads or preamplifier. Could be used as spares source for even more advanced drive repairs in future.
It is sad how many unique hard drives get discarded. There will never be more such hard drives manufactured for retro computers to use.
The infamous Conner drive from Malaysia. The factory now belongs to Seagate.
a good tip is if the hard drive is internally damaged, and board is good keep the board as you can always use it on a same drive withe dead board
Yes, I will keep the PCB. I also kept the board of the Quantum GoDrive. I may come across the same drives again that may be in need of spares.
Amazing repair, shame the drive doesn't work :(
I would try SpinRight on it to attempt to mark out the bad sectors with spare sectors.
I played around with SpinRite on another drive. Unfortunately, it seems like SpinRite requires a partitioned drive to work. So far, I couldn't make SpinRite detect the drive.
Honestly with a Conner drive it got a lot further than I anticipated. Even back in the day I had no success with connor drives. Our 486 from Packard Bell came with a Connor 170MB drive. And within the first year of owning the machine the drive failed and we had to get Packard Bell to replace it. The replaced Connor drive died in a week. Thinking it was something wrong with the computer, we took the whole machine in to be worked on. Machine was fine. Next Connor drive failed in a month. Fourth drive replacement that they did was a Seagate and it didn't have problems for the rest of the time we had the machine.
Get a usb to ide cable when you go back and a usb a to c adapter so you can connect drives to your phone as a quick test the smaller drives normally work without ext power but the full size drives might work with a battery bank.
I do have one of those universal IDE (40/44) and SATA to USB converters. 2.5" drives spin up and I was able to identify some broken ones (clicking, not spinning up, horrible scratching noises). I think about 80% of the drives at that place are DEAD. Chances are totally against you. Larger drives won't spin up as far as I am aware (without a proper 12V external power supply).
That poor Conner drive!
Geile Sache, dass alle Pins wieder angeschlossen werden konnten und die Elektronik lebt. Ich würde HDD Regenerator im Scan Mode und DBAN testen. IBM Drive Fitness Test und eventuell Seatools könnten auch etwas beitragen. Ansonsten aufschrauben und das Innenleben beleuchten.
Ich werde mal die ganzen Tools die jetzt nochmal in den Kommentaren genannten wurden, testen. War auch überrascht, dass die Elektronik noch funktioniert.
I used to make clocks out of old IDE hard drives.
It may be worth replacing the larger electrolytic capacitors on the board (the yellow with red stripe, and i think theres a couble black ones), those style of surface mount caps are notoriously troublemakers for things like the sega game gear, and i had two that were bad in an old bad drive
Alas, pretty much the outcome I expected. I had no doubt you would be able to fix the board since you're really good at this, but I would have been very surprised if the internals would still have been OK. Conner drives weren't exactly reliable to begin with (are there even any known working ones left at this point? 😅) and the age and harsh treatment at the recycler didn't improve the odds, either. It sure was worth a shot though!
I don't think cooling or heating will help in this case, as the actuator noise doesn't sound quite right to me. It's also worth a shot though of course. It isn't much extra effort and It's broken already, so it can't get any worse. Maybe some hardened grease loosens, some tolerances line up better or a capacitor value improves as it warms up, as the situation improved the longer it was running. I don''t see any electrolytic caps though. Ultimately, you should have a look inside, maybe you/we can at least learn what the cause of the remaining issue was.
Regarding the image quality, I think it's perfectly fine as it is, you could have spared the expense. Higher quality will of course still be nice though. Already looking forward to more Voodoo content! ♥
Suspect there is some physical shock damage to the heads or arm.
Your soldering footage is great though, nice and clear. It's good to practice on stuff like this, there might even be life in this drive... would be curious to see if there's anything obviously wrong and fixable under the cover.
I think there are enough ideas in the comments that would justify a follow-up! Thanks for watching!
I managed to get quite a few "scrap" 1TB SATA drives back in the day - they came from a huge server farm and it appeared the majority of them worked fine. I learnt later that the IT staff had pulled the incorrect drives when the array flagged a failure. Sadly the supply was short lived as they invested in a bulk eraser that wiped all info off the disk - including the geometry settings. The effort to revive them was no longer worth it.
I have seen hard drives in their original, sealed packaging. Dell hard drives, never installed in any system! There were at least 10 brand new drives. But they were for servers (SAS connector).
@@bitsundbolts I have quite a few of those as well - I think it was due to the use case. Enterprise bought a surplus of drives to enable hot swapping and when the server is decommissioned those spares go with it!
Sadly in the UK WEEE laws require businesses to dispose of ewaste in a documented way - no more "dumpster diving"!
You can try ddrescue or similar software to check what areas of the drive could be read. Then maybe it could be possible to partition it around damaged space.
Physical damage on a hard drive sound fatal to the heads inside. I think they're still able to move to certain locations but fail to deliver any data from the disks. Guess if you were to stick the board onto another drive that has failed electronics it could work again with this board.
Agreed. I will keep the PCB. The internals of the drive were probably damaged long time ago or because of the mishandling at the scrapyard. But I am going to give it another try. There are many suggestions I want to try.
By the sound of the drive the platter motor bearing is on its way out and this is enough to wobble the platter enough to not be able to work reliably. Try putting the drive upside down on the table or on its side and see if this changes anything.
I did try to run the drive standing on its side. There was no change in sound or behavior.
Hi Bits und Bolts. I enjoy all your videos. They are fantastic.
I have a question. Have you try HDD LLF Low Level Format Tool?
For a low level format of the drive i mean.
I have a similar best place in my town, but is rare to go there, because take me a lot of time to dig there.
Anyway. I hope you can recover it.
Continue with the good work.
Thank you! I'll continue to make videos and hope they're going to be even better in the future.
I have not tested any other software yet that wasn't in this video. I'll put it on the list and see if other tools may have more success with this drive. Thanks for watching!
We need 3dfx video 🙂 respect from the UK
Coming soon! I am in Germany right now. There should be a Voodoo 2 with blown up memory chips... I have seen the pictures - SPECTACULAR! This will be a fun one! And yes, there is still the Diamond Monster 3D and a Voodoo 3 2000 with screw driver marks on the chip (heatsink is still glued on).
That drive sounds like the head actuator is goofed up.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was. Those drives from the scrapyard have been treated badly. They are thrown around like brick stones. Well, it is their final destination.
I'd be interested to know what happens to these old drives at the facility. Do components get removed from boards, are valuable materials recovered - gold, copper, aluminium, etc - or does it all go in a giant machine that compacts and/or shreds it, and then it all goes in landfill?
They do mostly separation of individual parts. Plastic from metal, electronics from Disk platters, etc. then the separated parts are moved somewhere else for recovery. I do not believe there is anything that goes to landfills
I would have a try with a factory tool, in case it can low level format and initialise the drive. I did not find anything related to Conner, but at least The Retro Web seems to have Seagate format utility. It might be able to recognise the drive, as Seagate acquired Conner at some point.
Good point. I'll have a look!
Nice work even though there was only a very small chance it would work correctly after such an impact. Still, good practice for your leg-bending skills :)
Absolutely! The electronic repair was the main motivation to make this video. And this part did succeeded!
I suppose in the end it's good practice. Personally I'm not a fan of hard drives so I don't think there is a reason to put too much effort in them. I've thought about taking apart a 2019 laptop that failed after 2 months of use. Just for SMD practice. I've never done it before. Anyway.....it was ugly, but it apparently did the trick. I don't think it would have shown up otherwise.
Before using higher level software to work with partitions, try scanning surface by MHDD or Victoria DOS software. If reading failes, first run full erase scan.
Maybe HDAT2 will also do the trick.
Right! Those tools do not care about partitions. I will try them. They are part of the "Ultimate Boot CD" project.
@@bitsundbolts yes, those programms don't care about logical content, those print sector access time. If harddrive has issues, access time will be higher ("green" and "red" sectors), if there are unreadable ("bad") blocks - those will be displayed as well. Sometimes bad blocks are of software kind and can be fixed by rewriting them. That's why full write scan could help. Writing will not fix hardware bad sectors though. But it can force harddrive to remap those to reserved space (depends on a firmware). You can can view SMART there and see if Reallocated sector count grows or not.
One note: you may need older MHDD versions (like 2.60) to properly scan older drives (
Thanks for the info. I'll try and see how far I get.
I bet the same physical impact that damaged the interface and controller board also caused some physical damage to the heads/platters.
I believe that too. The head(s) might have touched the platters and got damaged. Nothing much that can be done in that case...
@@bitsundbolts Exactly what I was thinking.
The sound of the heads feels to me a bit strange. Could be a connection issue somewhere that doesn't prevent the drive to be detected, but not working properly. Could be the case?
Yes, it could be. But it does access parts of platters. I can read and write the boot track. And I managed to install ez-drive (also create the partition). I'll probably leave the drive for now. I have a lot of other drives from which I may learn more...
@@bitsundbolts yes, it seems to be a dead end. Once the time is limited, it will be wise focusing into more promising stuff.
That is a great repair, and a beautiful drive, even if it doesn't work.
Have you tried making a smaller partition, only until right before the rest of the process fails, and ignoring the rest of the space? I'm using some HDDs like this, the space available to me is smaller but at least they work.
The EZ partition was successfully created. It is a very tiny portion on the drive. You might be right that this may work, but only for a very tiny portion. I will try a few other tools and also see if small partitions may work somehow.
Freezer!!!
I've read wikipedia article about Victoria HDD testing utility some time ago, it says that program has an easter egg: if Conner Technology CT204 is connected it displays "Conner?! And where you found that yuck?" message at the bottom.
You can try it with your drive too xD Dunno if it about Victoria for DOS or Victoria for windows tho.
Haha! I think that will be worth a try.
Maybe rework the whole drive pcb, probably have solder cracks or something.
I'll have another look at the drive PCB. It absolutely could be that I missed something. ASMR Live stream with soothing music 🤣
Best software for checking hdd surface health and send specific commands is mhdd and victoria
Open it up and give as a look at the whole mechanism.
Do a Low Level Format with HDAT2 or MHDD, may that helps.
4:30 Lol, I aint touching that.
Low level format might revive it
Try using spinrite on it.
Absolutely no reason it should help, but you could try the old tossing it in a freezer an hour or two trick and seeing if you get any reads then.
fdisk said fthat. 😁
🤣
If it is indeed dead, it might be worth saving the chips from the board for future use
I'll definitely do that.
Can you try low level format or zero fill drive on seatools
I'll try Seatools on this drive. But if I can't make progress, you'll probably not hear about this drive again.
What about mhdd? Try this program, maybe it will work better than those mentioned in the video
I will try it.
@@bitsundbolts Еще Викторию 3.5 от Казанского. Все версии есть на сайте автора.
Connor drives are a *bit* better than Kalok drives, which means I wouldn't even bother with it - they're loud, slow, and mechanically unreliable. If this was a Quantum or a Seagate, I'd spend some time, but never on a Connor.
Get some Coppermine Pentium 3 from those pile, people in Xbox modding scene might be a good price for them, assuming they're not broken.
Use MHDD to ERASE the drive a few times and see if it helps :)
I'll try MHDD which is part of the "Ultimate Boot CD" project.
@@bitsundbolts yes :) it removes "soft" bad sectors quite efficiently
If it was for free , i try to dismount the drive , the other thing is lubricate the drive, i think if i was me i tried to lubricate the drive, because no more has to be done .
Try a utility called WDCLEAR.
Try MHDD
It's sad that you couldn't restore this hard drive. There was a Bitcoin wallet with $10 million on it.
I think those may be found on SATA drives... But I must admit, I was thinking of scanning a few drives and see what I can find...
Very strange behaviour. Makes me think it would be more electronic than mechanical/physical.
I'll double check the board. Maybe I have missed something.
Why did you even bother wasting your time repairing the IDE connector and chip. It obviously had a significant impact so was never going to work. Im surprised the BIOS detected it at all. When you open it, the heads will be damaged and the platters will be scratched.
I want that you throw this thing right back in to the trash because it is a waste of time...
I think your best bet is to try and make a complete hard drive from scratch ;)
A guy on YT makes chips at home (1000 to 10000 transistor) but making a HDD? If it could be spun up, clean itself and then told when to go you might be able to make a HDD at home if no chips are complex.
Ah, hehe. I don't know... I have a feeling that this would be a talent that is obsolete...
I said it like that because I get a feeling there's something wrong inside the platter. It was a joke lol
I don't even understand what kind of gear you would need to begin the process of making the platter and arm thingies inside.
id be like its dead jim thats alot of work for 1.2 gb
Honestly this is less about having a working drive and more about the process of performing the repair. The skills and work environment (tools and microscope) he's developing here might help him save more interesting hardware down the road.
Yes, that is exactly why this repair is useful to me. Even though the drive doesn't work, I practiced on the chip, did some troubleshooting, and achieved a tiny success. At least the drive reported for duty one last time... My electronics understanding is very very limited, but I do notice that I learn over time. There is little use of those disks and the hardware in general - except for nostalgia.