Micropolis 1304 HD repair
 

Hi,

I have a Tektronix 4404 with a storage unit that fails to spin up.
I am looking for any advice / links etc for repairing the 1304 HD.

It unlocks, spins up, sits there at (apparently) correct speed, then spins down after 15-20 seconds.

Any ideas?

Re: Micropolis 1304 HD repair
 

The Micropolis 1300 series are well-known for having a rubber bumper inside the HDA that turns to Evil Goo and sticks the head carriage to the end stop. As a result, at power-up the spindle starts, gets up to speed, it tries to move the heads to the first cylinder, fails as the head carriage is jammed, the control logic then doesn't get the servo information from the disk and spins the the thing down.

I've heard (but never tried it) that you can open the HDA in a reasonably clean environment (not a true cleanroom) and clean up the remains of the bumper. After which the drive will work well enough at least to recover the data from it.

One model of the Micropolis 1300 was sold as the DEC RD53 so searching for that might give some useful information.

Re: Micropolis 1304 HD repair
 

I've certainly taken the lid off similar-capacity (low 10's of MB) PC MFM/RLL 5.25 & 3.5" HDD's, back in the 90's in a not especially-clean environment, and they still worked afterwards.
I think I may have also tried cleaning the top surface with IPA, as may have getting 'stiction' where heads were sticking to surface, preventing spin-up.

I doubt a modern much-higher density 10's/100's of GB's HDD would be so forgiving / if you accidentally get a fingerprint etc on surface, it probably can't be resolved with a bit of cleaning with IPA. So these are no doubt a job for (expensive) data-recovery specialist, with clean rooms who have equipment to replace heads / transfer platters to a good mechanism.

I've also swapped-over the HDD's main control board, when there seemed to have been a fault on one of those. But it seems more-modern HDD's have parameters stored in the HDD's controller, and can''t swap these anymore.

Re: Micropolis 1304 HD repair
 

Thanks for that. Looks like I need to fix the capacitive keyboard first though.