Common Maxtor MFM drive failure mode -- any ideas?

[Al Kossow]

On 10/23/15 12:04 AM, Josh Dersch wrote:

> The 2190 does not, and it fails in precisely the same way I've personally seen three or four other Maxtor drives of the same era fail: It spins up fine, but when it goes to load the heads, it sounds
> like the voice coil positioner for the heads is "screaming" -- it emits a high-pitched, quite loud whine/buzz which persists until you power the drive down.  The drive is unresponsive during this time.
>

Sounds like a failure of the positioner servo. It is on a separate platter.

It should be possible to build something to open the servo loop and position the heads
externally. One of those projects that I would like to get to some day. I have about 50
Maxtor ESDI drives from Apollo's build system that I REALLY want to get the data off of
and I suspect there will be the same sort of problem with them.