1 Aug
2015
1 Aug
'15
4:27 p.m.
On Sat, Aug 01, 2015, Vlad Stamate wrote:
Hi,
I recently got a very nice HP 9816 with a 9121 drive unit from Earl
Baugh (thanks Earl!). The computer worked fine but the primary drive
of the 9121 refused to read the disk and made a continuous beating
noise. After I cleaned it on the outside I opened it to see what is
wrong with it. And I found this piece inside the drive itself:
http://imgur.com/dlqOexX (floppy added for size comparison).
After carefully removing it, the drive actually worked like a charm
and I was able to boot from it. I was pleasantly impressed that the
drive head has not been damaged bumping in the leather piece all the
time. I am not sure how that got there, I assume a child pushed it in
by mistake? I am not sure what it is either, the leather triangles
sewn together by hand it seem.
What other strange pieces did you find when you opened up classic computers?
While an Intel Mac laptop doesn't really qualify, I found an uneven
piece of hard plastic, about 2mm x 1.5mm, inside one of its RAM slots
when I went to upgrade it. How it got there I've never been able to
understand -- it was already populated with a DIMM that was working
correctly, and I think maybe I had actually put that DIMM there in the
first place, and never seen the odd chunk before.
It was a royal pain to remove, too -- I ended up using an X-Acto knife
to cut away part of the edge connected so I could remove it with a
tweezer. Boy was I shocked to realize that the actual metal pins that
the RAM module connected to were embedded in the piece of plastic edge
connector I cut away; somehow I managed to remove the plastic without
breaking any of them. Upon bending them slightly so they looked
straight, I put the RAM in, and everything was fine then.
--
Eric Christopherson