• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Hard disk bad track 0, date of manufacture codes

Resolder the connections on that plastic ribbon cable and on the drive's logic board that connects the 2 together.

If you have a cracked solder joint there you will get failed formats and other issues.

It's a 5 minute thing to do and I've used that to resurrect old drives in the past.
 
I tried Disk Manager

I tried Disk Manager

No one should apologize for not being helpful--you all have been a great help. I did try Disk Manager, and I got the same problem--bad this, bat that. In this case, too many cylinders were bad. The program tried to relocate the partition, but each time it would run into another bad cylinder. "Uncorrectable ECC [cylinder no.]" is the error I kept getting while trying to install the drive/create partition with Disk Manager. This program identified the hard disk as MFM/RLL, not ESDI.

For a picture of the fixed disk setup inside a Model 50, see http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/alf/ps2_50z. There seems to be a lot of questions about the connector from system to drive.

These disks are probably dead. They may even be physically bad, which would not be surprising after 20+ years.
 
...For a picture of the fixed disk setup inside a Model 50, see http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/alf/ps2_50z. There seems to be a lot of questions about the connector from system to drive...

Except that Arnold has some kind of unusual setup - the drive looks to be a DBA ESDI model, but the riser is different from anything else I have seen. It almost looks like the Model 50 MFM riser. Except for a couple BIOS chips on a riser version to run a DBA ESDI drive in a base Model 50 (no ´Z´), all of the other 50Z DBA ESDI risers (all riser diagramed at http://www.ibmmuseum.com/ohlandl/8550/8550_Controllers.html) have only circuit traces on the board (functionally equivalent to a ribbon cable).
 
I would agree, the PS/2 line seems to be much cheaper then the PC line, I have run across lots of bad PS/2s and parts!

It really just depends on the PS/2 or the part. A few models, mostly early on, are known to be buggy in certain areas. Parts, notably a couple brands of 1.44Mb floppy drives, are known problems.

Later PS/2s are industrial-strength (and maybe a little too "new" to be on-topic here)...
 
Back
Top