UK Vintage Radio Repair and Restoration Discussion Forum - View Single Post

TonyDuell · 20th Mar 2023, 5:02 pm

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.

20th Mar 2023, 5:02 pm	#2
TonyDuell Dekatron Join Date: Jun 2015 Location: Biggin Hill, London, UK. Posts: 5,225	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.