Common Maxtor MFM drive failure mode -- any ideas?

On Oct 24, 2015 6:36 PM, "Josh Dersch" <derschjo at gmail.com> wrote: on dried up and it fell off after the impact of running off the platter) so this drive is basically toast. At least now I can kind of see how one takes this drive apart to remove the spindle; if I get overly ambitious and find a working sacrificial XT2190 to start with I could almost see myself doing a spindle replacement surgery to see if I can recover the data. I've successfully glued heads back on and have cleaned platters of goo before. I had a full height 40 MB CDC drive from a PC AT if I recall that wouldn't start reliably, but once it was spinning, worked fine. I took it apart in a clean room and had the same issue as you with heads falling off. I reattached them with clear fingernail polish for fear that superglue would leave nasty cyanoacrylate fumes everywhere. The drive worked fine for several months after the repair and a low level format. It suffered the same problem again and I opted not to fix it a second time. It took me a while to figure out an optimal way to put the head back together. I ended up separating the heads with the big ends of zip ties which happened to be just the right height. Once I got everything mounted back in, I just pushed it over the platters, causing the zip tie pieces to be pushed out, and the heads to fall back over the platters. Ahh, found the album (which I think I've shared before): http://imgur.com/a/LbfZb Kyle