Repair and Recover a Macintosh Quantum Prodrive hard disk drive

In this video, i demonstrate how i temporarily recover the files of a dead quantum prodrive.

Your mileage may vary. This is only one type of fault, and is the most common of hard disks of this age, the disk will spin up and spin right back down without making a single click. Any time a Quantum cycles like this, its time to crack her open and unpark the head manually when the disk is fully spun up.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Macintosh
• HD
• repair
• data
• recovery
• quantum
• prodrive
• 160MB
• color
• classic

[themaritimeman]

Wow, that's really interesting! I have one of these drives, a 120 MB ProDrive ELS IDE unit from school.

I never knew hard drive death-by-opening was caused from enamel wearing from the heads. I always figured it was from foreign material settling on the platters. Is this enamel wear due to the unestablished air bearing between the head and the platters when the drive is open? Would drives with GMR heads withstand this better?

Great video!

[THEtechknight]

@themaritimeman It depends. not sure on the GMR head. Haven't done enough research. Yes its caused by the much lower air bearing.

[uxwbill]

Those old Quantum drives were some real workhorses. There's a plastic tongue on some of these that serves to lock the headstack in place. Sometimes it gets sticky and won't release reliably. I was able to carefully defeat one of those.

Stiction is definitely another big problem with the later Fireball series and the SCSI variants (not sure if they're called Fireball or something else). I usually give them a sharp "kink" at power on and then I get all the data off to another drive!

[THEtechknight]

@uxwbill I have an old 1997 intel server, that had Quantum Vikings in there. 4.5GB SCSI drives, all 10 of them. 7 of them failed from stiction.

I was able to take all of them apart and free the platters on all the drives from stiction, and there was goo left behind on the platter. almost like they overheated. Then i found a failed backplane fan. So there you go. I took a microfiber and cleaned all the goo from all platters.

The drives fired up and worked reliably for years, still do.

[TheUniqueflavour]

Thnx for sharing your experience.. Nice job!

[16mmDJ]

Huh, I will give this a try. Just to see if it works I guess. May have to get a new drive later on if I want the thing to keep running.

[shugo21]

I've actually had to do the same thing to an 80Mb Conner drive.

[Zagroseckt]

mainly just keep dust off the plater.

[tizzdizz]

Nice tips. I may have to try this one of these days...