Repairing old Conner Drives (20-100MB) -> Oil, no spin

[PhantombrainM]

Hi there,

we're from another forum specialized to old GRIDCASE Computers.
This are rare computers from the 80's used by NASA and Army Air Force or as seen on ALIEN (the movie).

We've got problems with HDDs.

Since of security reasons its not possible to use other harddrives than the ones which are stored in the BIOS.
Its very complex and we need a good programmer who knows about assembler and x86 but thats another story.
(If there is anyone out there feel free to contact me)

To make things short we're stuck at using Conner Drives (20-100MB).

In particular:
Conner CP3024 (20MB)
Conner CP3044 (40MB)
Conner 34104 (100MB)
and 2 or 3 others.


Time makes it harder to get those and they get broken day by day.
We're thinking of repairing them. They've got a big problem.
They ran out of oil (lubricant). They're very oily outside.

After some time they spin up down up down... and not working anymore.

Today i openened a CP3044 and looked inside. I know its not a good think, but it was broken so.. it doesnt matter.
I saw that the head wasnt moving anymore.

I pushed the head to the side starting softly and harder and harder till it head moves abrupt to the side with hearing a "clicking".
I powered it up again and the head is moving again! It spins up, head is moving with some "clicking" sounds and it stays spinning. Its working again.

So good so far but we don't know where the oil comes from. Others found out that after a while the HDD doesnt get to full speed anymore and then it will start to fail again.

If anyone knows a way to refil the missing lubricant (and where it belongs to) with a more modern one we might use these drives for a lot of years again.

So i signed up here and aksing the world if someone has hints or anything.
(or is good at assembler, bios, x86...hehe)

regards from germany
Manuel

[Vulcan]

I think I used one of those old GridCase laptop computers many, many years ago which had a gas plasma display (orange?), as part of some test equipment

If anyone knows a way to refil the missing lubricant

I work with electronics (and assembler ), not DR, but I doubt that any fix to the old drives would be as simple as just adding lubricant.

The fact that the old lubricant seems to have escaped (you said the drives were oily outside) suggests that one or more bearing seals have failed - this won't be fixed by adding lubricant. It's also not completely clear to me from your description, whether the failed bearings are on the VCM (which moves the heads), or the main motor.

I've worked on projects to keep old systems working in the past, and in your case, I would be examining at least two other areas, in case fixing the old drives is too difficult / expensive / time-consuming etc.:

a) working with a good DR company to reprogram the reported identity, geometry and capacity of a modern PATA disk drive, to match what the system expects from one of the older Conner drives, and see if that is enough for the modern drive to be usable by these systems; or

b) working with a programmer (as you already mentioned), to investigate changing the system (BIOS? OS? apps?) to be compatible with modern larger capacity drives (without the drives needing to be modified), although only a small amount of the drive's capacity might actually be used (e.g. 100MB).

Anyway, those are just my thoughts - other people may disagree or have different suggestions. Good luck with whatever you decide

[fzabkar]

FWIW, 20 years ago I hacked the drive tables in Award BIOSes on 386 motherboards. Those were the days when BIOS did not provide for user defined drive types. I added lots of "high" capacity models, including 200MB Conner and Maxtor, IIRC. This was very easy to do, and required no knowledge of assembler. You just needed to recompute the checksum afterwards. In my case I modified an unused text string, such as a copyright notice, to ensure that the checksum remained at 0.

After doing the above, you could shrink the capacity of a modern IDE drive by creating a HPA using a tool such as HDAT2.

If you're interested, I'll show you how to do it (for free).

[Vulcan]

Ah, yes, perhaps I was taking the mention of security details and being "stuck" using Conner drives (as described by the OP) too exactly, hence my suggestion of changing drive identity or programming around such security. (I have worked on systems which did check for specific drive models in the BIOS, so the OP's description fitted with my experience.)

If there is actually no special security (just the usual older BIOS limitation), and no need for the drives to identify themselves as Conner, then of course other easier options become possible

[seed.helper]

hello i see this drives where important in the 80 and 90s...

i think my conner drive did not loose any oil and its spining and moving the arm correctly... i can feel the arm moving

just-for-fun-conner-peripherals-ide-hard-drive-104mb-310-t21260.html

can anyone help me