Kaypro 10 back on-line

[Terry Yager]

I'm happy to report that my Kaypro 10 is "well" again. I didn't even need to replace the original hard drive, although it did suffer some phisical dammage to a couple of the platters. Pulled the power supply, (the root cause of the head crash to begin with) and sure enough, needed to do some re-soldering (typical of Kaypro power supplies). After re-assembling it I fired it up to smoke-test it and BANG! ...a brilliant flash of light and a loud noise. (Hmmmmmn...musta bridged sum'n with a stray drop of solder. Fortunately, the solder bridge acted as a fuse and "blew" without causing any further harm). Re-formatted and re-installed the software, thanks to a set of TeleDisk immages I found (unsolicited) in my email one day. (A big TNX to Don Maslin, for the service he provides).

--T

 

[Erik]

Congratulations! I'm glad you got your machine back online!

Do you think the damage to the hard drive was physical (i.e. head crash?)

If so, are you worried about stray particles causing more head crashes?

Erik

 

[Terry Yager]

Congratulations! I'm glad you got your machine back online!

Do you think the damage to the hard drive was physical (i.e. head crash?)

If so, are you worried about stray particles causing more head crashes?

Erik

Yeah, the repair consisted of re-heating the solder on all three voltage regulators, which were loose. Before the fix-up, you could hear the hard drive spin at different speeds--spin-up, spin-down, etc. The one time it came all the way to a stop, and when I did get it to spin-up again, half of my directory was gone. (Some "new" files also appeared, with un-typable garbage characters for filenames). So, I figgered the head crashed right into the directory tracks. Deleting all the garbage filenames got them out of the directories, but the space they were allocated was not changed. After losing at least half the software, it still reported the same amount of free space, so a new format was called for, to regain my drive space. The only downside is that even though I did back up the drive to save what was left, when I went to reinstall, the first disk was unreadable, and Mufbar won't procede without it, so I fear I've lost it all. Caution: Beware of using old media. I've been having a lot of trouble from my floppy disks, even though they are "new" (still shrink-wrapped) boxes of disks. (Anybody know of a source for new new 5.25" floppies?)

--T

 

[carlsson]

Someone I knew had an original 20 MB A590 (IIRC) hard drive to his Amiga. It crashed, and he reformatted, only to figure out a few MB were lost. Strange, he thought and issued another reformatting. Another few MB lost, and by now he disconnected and opened the case I presume, only to find metal dust gone loose. The more times he would use the drive, the less storage space would remain.

I'm not sure if this was an urban legend or what really happened, but this is how I've been told and I can't really judge if it is possible.

 

[Terry Yager]

Someone I knew had an original 20 MB A590 (IIRC) hard drive to his Amiga. It crashed, and he reformatted, only to figure out a few MB were lost. Strange, he thought and issued another reformatting. Another few MB lost, and by now he disconnected and opened the case I presume, only to find metal dust gone loose. The more times he would use the drive, the less storage space would remain.

I'm not sure if this was an urban legend or what really happened, but this is how I've been told and I can't really judge if it is possible.

I dunno. I'm just hoping that the discs spin fast enough to dislodge any stray shavings that may have landed on 'em. (I'd be more concerned about the condition of the (glass) heads after coming into contact with the spinning platter).

--T

 

[Erik]

I had a Priam drive (known for performance, back in the day) that replaced the CMI drive on my IBM AT. After several years it started to get "flakey" with files getting corrupted and eventually the directory going bad.

I was pretty good about backups so I'd just re-format every time it got nasty and find myself with a smaller and smaller drive. The drive would then become "flakey" again sooner.

As it turned out there were repeated head crashes each adding to the debris floating around in the drive and each chopping more of the disk out of service.

The heads themselves survived, but enough of the platter rust was floating around as junk that the drive wouldn't last for long after each reformat.

I eventually replaced the drive and took it apart to figure out what I described above.

The bulk of the head crashes were pretty minor and only showed as "glazed" areas on the platters. A few went all the way through the oxide layer. I suspect those were from the last hours of the drives life. . .

Erik