Weird situation with bad sectors on ST-225

[Teletech]

I guess if swapping the cable and its the same, I'll try opening it up and blowing it out with my air compressor. I'm thinking along those lines myself, either dust or something is in the drive. Never encountered this problem before with a MFM disk. The filter does look a little crusty.

Drives were assembled in a cleanroom for a good reason, if you do open one, make sure to at the very least do it in the downdraft from the best HEPA filter you can lay hands-on.
Air compressor air is full of microdroplets of water, usually oily-water with particles in it from the cylinder wall and ring of the piston. Canned "air" or other clean compressed gas (ultrapure nitrogen for preference). Keep your angle of incidence high and don't use more pressure than you have to since higher pressures can actually force material into a surface.
If you do see any signs of media-smearing, you can use a cleanroom wipe saturated with alcohol. Our opticians say ethanol leaves less residue than isopropal.

 

[durgadas311]

I, personally, would never open up a winchester drive - at least not with any hope of ever using it again. Once you break that seal, the drive is effectively useless. Unless you can do that in a cleanroom environment equivalent to what is used to manufacture the drive.

As far as the behavior of the drive, more than just media can go bad. There is quite a bit of logic, including processors, on the drive. Any number of things could have gone bad over the years.

 

[Teletech]

I, personally, would never open up a winchester drive - at least not with any hope of ever using it again. Once you break that seal, the drive is effectively useless. Unless you can do that in a cleanroom environment equivalent to what is used to manufacture the drive.

As far as the behavior of the drive, more than just media can go bad. There is quite a bit of logic, including processors, on the drive. Any number of things could have gone bad over the years.

I used to do it quite commonly, though the drives under about 10MB are vastly more tolerant of imperfect conditions. Being used to pack drives gives one a bit more comfort with the idea I think.
Worth noting that a cleanroom is not an absolute value, the class of cleanroom means a lot with some of them being noting very special.
Good point on the media not always being the failure point though, swapping controller cards is *always* preferable to breaking the seal and it's not like there is any shortage of ST-225 boards in the world.