[Coco] Hard disk repairs, was Linux, was Drivewire....

[Joel Ewy]

Phill Harvey-Smith wrote:
> Joel Ewy wrote:
>> Gene Heskett wrote:
>> Current kernels won't, but it certainly did in the past.  My first 
>> Linux installation was a '386-SX/40 with 16M of RAM and a couple 40M 
>> MFM drives (Well, one of them only formatted to about 32M after I 
>> opened the case and dug out a broken-off R/W head [I know, don't EVER 
>> do this -- it was ruined anyway, and worked fine for me until I 
>> replaced them with a 100M IDE drive.  Just used it for swap, 
>> anyway...]).  
>
> Humm glad to know I'm not the only one to have done this, in my case 
> it was a full height MFM 5.25" drive, the problem for me was that the 
> head that had crashed was head 0 so the drive would not even spin up. 
> So I whiped out my soldering iron and cut the connections to head 0 
> and 3, and swapped them, worked fine as a 15MB drive for a couple of 
> years after that, mind I only ever used it as a test drive.
>
> Cheers.
>
> Phill.
>
Mine was a half-height 5.25" Seagate ST 251 IIRC.  In my case it was an 
easier fix, since it was the last head rather than the first.  The loose 
head was impeding the travel of the head assembly, so I dug it out, told 
the BIOS format routine the drive had 3 heads instead of 4, and gave it 
a try, more than half expecting it to fail.  But it worked.

JCE