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Vintage hard drive refuses to die - but possibly on its last leg?

Hate to bump an old thread like this, but since I got one of those Strebito tool kits for Christmas (fortunately it includes the tiny T5 torx bit you need to disassemble these drives, along with a bunch of other bits and tools) I decided to revisit this. Disassembled the drive, followed @compaqportableplus's repair advice, made sure to be careful with my shaky hands and now the drive works perfectly!

Coincidentally the HDD in my Tecra 500CDT is now the one having this problem, while at the same time its CD-ROM drive magically started to read disks again after REFUSING to do so for over a year... not only do I love old Toshiba laptops for their ease of serviceability, but they're just oh-so full of surprises! :D

Hopefully the HDD in my iBook G3 doesn't start to go kaplooie any time soon since those require a COMPLETE teardown to get to the drive...
 
compaqportableplus said:
it sounds like the rubber bumper that the head rests on while in the park position is starting to get sticky. The Toshiba drives are the latest ones to start having this issue.
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Oh you've got to be kidding me! Never knew that, never ran into a dead one either. Though I do have a positively ancient 320MB 2.5" SCSI drive by Toshiba that still works! I wonder which ones have got the bumper. Shame so many used it. I tried to bring a Quantum Europa 2.5" IDE back (same issue) but I wrecked the heads by accident :(
Did succeed on a 40MB conner a while back though! Wasn't so lucky with a 20MB conner, didn't break anything fixing it but the drive had other issues and still wouldn't read. Both were also 2.5" SCSI.
 
I actually have a 40MB Plus Hardcard that I got that also had a sticky head bumper. I opened it, covered the bumper with a piece of tape since it's practically fully accessible, used a can of compressed air to lightly blow the dust out (can't stress the lightly enough because you don't want to blow the heads off of the arms with too high of an airflow rate) and closed it up again. No bad sectors, and I've had the drive for a while now.
 
Those Plus drives are manufactured by Quantum - the worst offender of the rubber bumpers. Glad to hear of a successful fix, never seen one working on any videos ever.
 
3lectr1c said:
Those Plus drives are manufactured by Quantum - the worst offender of the rubber bumpers. Glad to hear of a successful fix, never seen one working on any videos ever.
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If there's any interest, I could make a video of it in my 5160. I even have the software installed that puts a + up in the corner of the screen whenever the drive is accessed
 
Yeah, absolutely! Would love to hear how one of those sounds. Theoretically should be similar to a Quantum of the era but I’ve never heard one that works.
 
3lectr1c said:
Yeah, absolutely! Would love to hear how one of those sounds. Theoretically should be similar to a Quantum of the era but I’ve never heard one that works.
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It's actually surprisingly quiet. The head seeks can barely be heard over the PSU fan and are almost impossible to hear once the MFM drive is connected.
 
Interesting. There were some quite quiet drives in that time, I have a Conner CP-321 that is nearly impossible to hear. Unfortunately it died a while back.
 
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