MFM drive rescue

From: ian_primus at yahoo.com --- silvercreekvalley wrote: Was it a tantalum capacitor? I had the same thing happen to me with a 9 gig full height 5 1/4" Micropolis SCSI drive. It was in an external enclosure. I had hooked it up to a Sun system, formatted it and partitioned it, and went into the next room to burn a CD. Ten minutes later, I smelled burning - went in, and the room was smokey. There was a sizeable burnt mark on the board, and I picked off the burnt-up component and made sure nothing was shorting. Hooked the drive back up and it worked fine. I didn't even replace the part. (wouldn't have been easy to replace, the board and the surrounding tracks were burnt out) It was just a bypass capacitor, and it wasn't really necessary to the circuit (apparently). I ended up using the drive like that for a while, with no problems. Tantalums do that - flash, smoke and burn - when they fail. Nothing needs to cause them to fail, they just go. So, if it was a tantalum, you should be able to replace it (or ignore it) and the drive should still work.