JonnyGators
Experienced Member
One of my primary goals in my vintage computer hobby is to maintain a ComputerLand BC88 to be as close as possible to the one my family had when I was growing up.
This has meant a part of that goal is coming up with long term solutions to keep working 20MB Tandon TM262 MFM hard drives in my collection. Which has proven quite a challenge.
Up until recently, I’ve had 4 of these drives in my collection, 1 of which works, the other 3 not so much. Meanwhile, I have at least 3 working Seagate ST225 drives – those seem to have a better track record. Too bad that’s not the model I have a nostalgia thing for.
I periodically do an eBay check looking for low priced options to try and get a spare going. Recently I found a seller that had 4 of them with power connectors cut off being sold as-is no returns for $25 each. I offered $20 each, and at that cost with combined shipping, if I can just get 1 of them working it would be worth it. This has brought the collection up to 8.
They came in this past Friday, and I picked up some adapters that have the right molex connector to strip and solder to the boards. And I ended up with the following outcome:
2 drives would spin up and make the right startup sounds, and the PC would boot without a 1701 error, but were unreadable and wouldn’t take a partition. They did take a low level format, but afterwards wouldn’t take a partition. The behavior was different by DOS version:
1 drive had a broken orange ribbon cable
Of the 2 spinning up drives, 1 of them also had its ribbon cable break upon doing a bit of mixing and matching between boards and drives unfortunately, so now I have 2 broken ribbon cable drives.
I also moved the board off of the known working drive over to a few of the drives that would spin up, but they still wouldn’t take a partition or format.
Norton utilities wouldn’t see the drives, but maybe that’s because they’re not taking a partition, so there isn’t anything for it to see.
Today I brought up my 2nd working BC88 with a working HD controller just to test again with a 2nd known working set of hardware. What testing I redid was still the same.
I was beginning to wonder if there was some common point of failure, since it seemed that I could get drives to stay spun up and pass boot without producing a 1701 error, but not take a partition, which seemed odd to be feeling like that was something I was seeing as a common failure on multiple hardware that otherwise sounded like it should work.
But then I managed to cobble together a 2nd working drive – so that kind of ruined that theory.
I took the board off of old sparky, and replaced it with a board off of one of my other old drives that was previously working but developed grinding sounds. It took some doing to get things to spin up stably, but after 10 or so attempts the drive stayed powered on and booted without a 1701 error. No readable partition on the drive, wouldn’t take a partition, so I low level formatted. After low level formatting, I was able to give it a partition. Upon reboot, to my surprise, the partition was present, and the format c: command started without error. After a while, the format errored out with an error of track 0 being bad. I decided to try again, and again it tried, and this time finished successfully. I did a DOS setup on it, removed my floppy, restarted – and it boots.
Success! I’ve managed to get 1 working drive out of using parts from the new lot, which has already made it worth the purchase.
Anyways, I guess I wanted to post this info to see if anyone else out there is still working on also fighting this uphill battle of maintaining working MFM hard drives, and can offer any tips, or things that have worked for them.
I think my next steps or goals are:
This has meant a part of that goal is coming up with long term solutions to keep working 20MB Tandon TM262 MFM hard drives in my collection. Which has proven quite a challenge.
Up until recently, I’ve had 4 of these drives in my collection, 1 of which works, the other 3 not so much. Meanwhile, I have at least 3 working Seagate ST225 drives – those seem to have a better track record. Too bad that’s not the model I have a nostalgia thing for.
I periodically do an eBay check looking for low priced options to try and get a spare going. Recently I found a seller that had 4 of them with power connectors cut off being sold as-is no returns for $25 each. I offered $20 each, and at that cost with combined shipping, if I can just get 1 of them working it would be worth it. This has brought the collection up to 8.
They came in this past Friday, and I picked up some adapters that have the right molex connector to strip and solder to the boards. And I ended up with the following outcome:
2 drives would spin up and make the right startup sounds, and the PC would boot without a 1701 error, but were unreadable and wouldn’t take a partition. They did take a low level format, but afterwards wouldn’t take a partition. The behavior was different by DOS version:
- DOS 2.11 – fdisk would start and claim to see the drive, and would claim to create a partition, but upon reboot the format command wouldn’t see the drive, and fdisk would again show a drive that wasn’t partitioned.
- DOS 3.30 – fdisk wouldn’t start, wouldn’t see a fixed drive
1 drive had a broken orange ribbon cable
Of the 2 spinning up drives, 1 of them also had its ribbon cable break upon doing a bit of mixing and matching between boards and drives unfortunately, so now I have 2 broken ribbon cable drives.
I also moved the board off of the known working drive over to a few of the drives that would spin up, but they still wouldn’t take a partition or format.
Norton utilities wouldn’t see the drives, but maybe that’s because they’re not taking a partition, so there isn’t anything for it to see.
Today I brought up my 2nd working BC88 with a working HD controller just to test again with a 2nd known working set of hardware. What testing I redid was still the same.
I was beginning to wonder if there was some common point of failure, since it seemed that I could get drives to stay spun up and pass boot without producing a 1701 error, but not take a partition, which seemed odd to be feeling like that was something I was seeing as a common failure on multiple hardware that otherwise sounded like it should work.
But then I managed to cobble together a 2nd working drive – so that kind of ruined that theory.
I took the board off of old sparky, and replaced it with a board off of one of my other old drives that was previously working but developed grinding sounds. It took some doing to get things to spin up stably, but after 10 or so attempts the drive stayed powered on and booted without a 1701 error. No readable partition on the drive, wouldn’t take a partition, so I low level formatted. After low level formatting, I was able to give it a partition. Upon reboot, to my surprise, the partition was present, and the format c: command started without error. After a while, the format errored out with an error of track 0 being bad. I decided to try again, and again it tried, and this time finished successfully. I did a DOS setup on it, removed my floppy, restarted – and it boots.
Success! I’ve managed to get 1 working drive out of using parts from the new lot, which has already made it worth the purchase.
Anyways, I guess I wanted to post this info to see if anyone else out there is still working on also fighting this uphill battle of maintaining working MFM hard drives, and can offer any tips, or things that have worked for them.
I think my next steps or goals are:
- Determine a capacitor parts list to replace capacitors on these boards – see if that improves some of the other non working drives. Certainly wouldn’t hurt anything especially considering I’ve had a few of these blow in explosive ways in my time dealing with vintage drives. Is there a schematic/service guide for this drive?
- Find a better way to lubricate the stepper motor. I’ve found a drop of 3 in 1 oil on the motor gets them going again after they’ve sat for a while, but then if I put them away for months, they seize up again and require a reapplication – is there something better for them and longer lasting
- Is there anything that can be done for the cracked/broken orange ribbon cables – a way to attach an extension/replacement connector? Fully replacing the ribbon is an unlikely solution, as it disappears into the platter container.
- Perhaps someday build a clean environment for opening them up if there are repairs that can be done that require that - might make fully replacing the broken ribbon cables possible
- My working drive sometimes struggles with certain files - is there a process to find and mark bad portions on the disk?
