Time for some old hard drive shenanigans!

Comments

[SweetAI Belle]

Seems like with old hardware, the capacitors and leaking batteries are some of the big things to check for. And water damage, of course. (I kinda get the impression that any old hardware with a battery should probably have the battery replaced with one less likely to damage it, really, though that's more computers and cards than hard drives...)

I seem to remember places sell just the controller boards for hard drives, too, so if all else fails, it might be possible to buy another controller board and plug the hard drive into it.

I've seen some youtube channels around where people get things like old IBM XTs and macs and fix 'em up...

--Sweetie Belle

[TheMajorTechie]

5572427
Man, I wish I could be those channels, but the thrift stores around here stock mostly Pentium 4 and Core 2 Duo systems these days and I don't have the money to keep up my unhealthy addiction to browsing Ebay's vintage computing lists.

[TheMajorTechie]

5572427
Though, from the testing I did both on-camera and off-camera, it's only two shorted capacitors. I'm thinking of buying some caps off of Digikey and replacing them myself first before I do anything else, since those caps are under a dollar each.

[SweetAI Belle]

5572428
Yeah, and I don't end up even looking because I know how much trouble I'd have getting systems I found home, let alone storage space and cost. Sometimes it seems like it's computer swap meet type places they get them, or someone was throwing them away somehow, like a school throwing away dozens of iBooks. I'd take 'em if anyone told me they were throwing away this stuff.

I'm thinking of channels like these:
https://www.youtube.com/c/Lazygamereviews/videos
https://www.youtube.com/c/RMCRetro/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/craig1black
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbtwi4wK1YXd9AyV_4UcE6g

With two bad capacitors, though, definitely replace those before anything. Though I've mostly just watched videos of other people fixing things. I'm mostly software. I can do hardware stuff (and have built computers many times!), but once you have to pull out a soldering iron, that's about where I stop, though I have one, and have been meaning to get some practice with it...

--Sweetie Belle

[TheMajorTechie]

5572432
XD

Yeah, I've been trying to keep a balance between hardware and software. Much of what I know has been in hardware, but college has been helping me round out my skills.

[SweetAI Belle]

5572434
Whereas I basically started out mostly in software, but have picked up hardware stuff over time. It doesn't hurt that I'm interested in emulation, and to emulate hardware in software, you kinda need to know how it works.

I've gotten better on the hardware side, of course. I replaced a bunch of stuff inside this laptop, after all.

And I do have some various electronics components, breadboards, an arduino and raspberry pico, a little screen, and other things sitting around, waiting for me to get more practice with electronics sometime. I've got a bad tendency to get things for projects, then never do the projects...

--Sweetie Belle