Kaypro successes

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 1:29 AM, Jim Brain <brain at jbrain.com> wrote: I don't know the Kaypro10 specifically, but unlike with some types of later drives, the ST225 should "just spin up" when power is applied. On common thing to the ST225 (and ST251 and others) is "sticktion". The heads could be "glued" to the platters by the lubricant that was used to prevent/minimize damage when the drive was spun down and the heads landed. I've personally had luck powering up stuck drives on an extended power cable (to give more elbow room for what's to follow), then holding the drive by the corners, platters parallel to the floor, pulling one hand close while pushing the other hand away with a "snap" action. It's a single impulse, meant to give a kick to aid the motor. If the heads are stuck but everything else is functional, this motion often frees things long enough to copy the data off before retiring the drive. I certainly wouldn't keep single copies of valuable data on a drive that had stuck once since it's nearly guaranteed to happen again. Back in the day, the short-term solution was to not turn the box off so the heads wouldn't land and stick again. Fortunately, in the world of ST412-interface ("MFM") drives, the ST225 was one of the single-most popular models manufactured. Unfortunately, many of them logged a lot of hours and died or are not that far away from dying, so even a replacement drive is a hit-or-miss prospect. I haven't worked with hard drives in Kaypros, but drives of this type in the 5MB-80MB were what PCs had from the XT on up until they started shipping with IDE drives (except for the less-than-mainstream machines that had ESDI, SCSI, or, rarely, SMD drives). The formatting software would be unique to the platform (and possibly the controller as well), \ -ethan