Maxtor full-height 5.25" drives of death

I'm definitely interested but didn't have anything to contribute other than that I have both XT2190s and XT1140s that are still working (at least for now). So yes, please share whatever you find. m ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ian via cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> To: "Tom Gardner" <t.gardner at computer.org>; "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2018 3:05 PM Subject: Re: Maxtor full-height 5.25" drives of death On Feb 8, 2018, at 11:03, Tom Gardner via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: Good point. The lisp machines I?ve been using the drives with are way past their prime too- pushing 34+ years outside of their warranty. I think next time one fails, instead of trying to understand the problem and repair it so it can last another 30, I?ll just be thankful it lasted this long, gold scrap the boards, and build a gaming PC out of the case. It did, after all, have a good run. /s I will now try, likely in vain, to put this thread back on the rails- A colleague, offline, in the first useful and on-topic response to my query, tells me that there is an analog head preamplifier on the ribbon inside the HDA which is suspect- a drop out here can cause both the ?missing head? behavior, as well as the bad positioning behavior- if the head is on the servo track- common to these drives. This makes intuitive sense. As there are a number of machines that *require* the ESDI Maxtor models- IBM RT, early SGI, Symbolics- in the absence of an ESDI emulator- I think repairs are a good option. I?ll experiment on a 2190 MFM model I recently imaged that shows up with lots of errors on the same heads. It uses the same HDA as the ESDI models. I?ll report back here, though it seems no one on the list is interested in discussion beyond anecdotes when it comes to 80s hardware. My hope is that it simply needs the joints attaching it to the ribbon reflowed. - I