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What to do with apparently dead hard drives

J

JohnElliott

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As I'm going through my collection winnowing out those items that I don't know to be useful or believe to be beautiful, I've come upon a couple of vintage hard drives that don't spin up (a TM-262 with its matching ISA controller, and a Conner CP3024). I'm in two minds about what to do with them. If they worked, however briefly, I could erase them. But I wouldn't want to dispose of them as they are; if they could be repaired, then whoever repairs them could get at the data on them, and I've no way of knowing whether they contain personal information that shouldn't be got at.

So I'm leaning toward the conclusion that I've got to put them beyond use somehow (drill through the platters?) and then get rid of them at the local waste disposal site.

Any other suggestions?
 
What kind of private information do you think is going to be on a 20 megabyte hard drive? Top secret bleeding-edge 1987 tech designs? Someone's Compuserve passwords? EGA goat porn?

I have a hard time imagining someone pulling drives out of a Chinese landfill taking the time to repair any broken drives at all. They certainly would not know what to do with an MFM interface.

They are already WAY beyond use to any normal person.
 
There's absolutely no way to repair these things right? Pretty much we are on the glide path to a future where none from that era work?
 
The only drives i keep hold of are the big MFM drives as long as they at least spin up, I find them useful to use as a load and i can re-use the drive carrier, Anything else gets dumped if i can't get it working, If i was worried about what may be on the drive, a drill and or a big hammer would take care of that.
 
I hate the idea of destroying old drives, even if there is data on them. Nobody is going to shed a tear for an IDE drive that was produced in the millions, but the older or more unusual drives should be preserved. Hard drive repair (beyond simple component swapping) isn't common because it is difficult, but it can be done.

Also, at this point 20 or 30 year old data really isn't relevant. When I accept old drives or floppy disks I let people know what I'm going to do - erase and reuse. I'm not interested in their data. I will offer them a CD of their data, but I can do that without actually looking at the data. And in some cases I encourage them to take a look around because often there is good data that they have forgotten about. (This is often true of machines before the Internet became common.)
 
I deal with customer data on drives from the 80s that *do* contain relevant data. If the drive has crashed I typically save the controller board, disassemble the head/disk assembly (HDA), and the platters either get shredded or become target practice. That's for customer stuff with actual manufacturing trade secrets known to exist on the drives.

If it's a MFM drive and it's seemingly dead, you can be pretty sure that even IF someone were to fix it, unless it's someone who knows there's something good on there and is working to get the data off, they're probably not going to be able to. MFM drives are essentially paired with their controller and require a low-level format to be used on a new controller. There are things like Dave Gesswein's MFM tool that can read drives from various controllers, but the average person who just wants to reuse a MFM drive probably isn't going to bother with something like that.

For anything else that's actually working, I just DBAN it, or if I don't care about what was on there, `mkfs.ext2 -cc` under Linux just to quick pattern-test the drive and make sure it's still in good shape.
 
mbbrutman said:
I hate the idea of destroying old drives, even if there is data on them.
Click to expand...
Same here.

Hard drive repair (beyond simple component swapping) isn't common because it is difficult, but it can be done.
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Are you into this sort of repair? If not, might you know someone who is?

I have quite a few HH and FH MFM drives, e.g., Maxtor, Miniscribe, Micropolis, Seagate, Toshiba, Teac, Imprimis and Tulin that could benefit from somebody who knows how to do this.
 
SomeGuy said:
What kind of private information do you think is going to be on a 20 megabyte hard drive? Top secret bleeding-edge 1987 tech designs? Someone's Compuserve passwords? EGA goat porn?
Click to expand...

You never know. One 80s computer I bought on eBay had obviously been used to run a hotel. I only investigated briefly before wiping the drive, but it could have contained customers' or employees' personal information - and even after 30 years I'd be hesitant about letting someone have it.
 
I don't know about that connor, but if those are suffering from head "stiction", that TM-262 might let you manually actuate the heads or spindle motor I don't have a TM-262, but I have several drives with accessible steppers where I can give them a push, then power them up and they will run. If it does and it reads/formats OK, then I'd park the heads and hold on to that drive in case someone gets desperate enough to figure out how to fix those issues.
 
SomeGuy said:
I don't know about that connor, but if those are suffering from head "stiction", that TM-262 might let you manually actuate the heads or spindle motor I don't have a TM-262, but I have several drives with accessible steppers where I can give them a push, then power them up and they will run. If it does and it reads/formats OK, then I'd park the heads and hold on to that drive in case someone gets desperate enough to figure out how to fix those issues.
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If it's a last-ditch effort, I've also opened the HDAs and freed heads up. I've fixed a few drives that way, a pair of RD52As are still running fine with nothing but the factory bad sectors, and a little LaPine drive which still gets occasional use. In other cases, it's worked long enough to get data off, but the drives either suffered some other failure or would get sticky after even a few hours of power-off.
 
I've probably got enough spinning rust in 2.5" and 3.5" stashed away to last me the rest of my lifetime and beyond if i used em.
 
JohnElliott said:
You never know. One 80s computer I bought on eBay had obviously been used to run a hotel. I only investigated briefly before wiping the drive, but it could have contained customers' or employees' personal information - and even after 30 years I'd be hesitant about letting someone have it.
Click to expand...

Reminds me of a PC I had helped a relative clean some material the previous owners left on. Their daughter worked in a specialized medical doctors office, and she gave them an old pc they were no longer using in the office. It was supposedly cleaned, however I found several spots were information was stored outside the normal user folders.
 
JohnElliott said:
As I'm going through my collection winnowing out those items that I don't know to be useful or believe to be beautiful, I've come upon a couple of vintage hard drives that don't spin up (a TM-262 with its matching ISA controller, and a Conner CP3024). I'm in two minds about what to do with them. If they worked, however briefly, I could erase them. But I wouldn't want to dispose of them as they are; if they could be repaired, then whoever repairs them could get at the data on them, and I've no way of knowing whether they contain personal information that shouldn't be got at.

So I'm leaning toward the conclusion that I've got to put them beyond use somehow (drill through the platters?) and then get rid of them at the local waste disposal site.

Any other suggestions?
Click to expand...

Its quite possible that drives which don't spin up can be made to work long enough to get the data off. Sometimes freezing will help, perhaps it changes the tolerances enough to get it spinning. I recovered a 20meg drive in toshiba portable which simply had a stuck head latch, so I would physically damage the platter. Seeing as its a flying head, I would say any distortion would render it largely
un-readable...
 
I've encountered a couple of drives that had lost their servo track (these were voice-coil closed-loop servo positioners). They're basically dumpster fodder, as I know of no way to recover a servo track without destroying the data on the drive.
 
I bet somebody somewhere knows how to attach an external resolver. There's probably big money in that.
 
Before declaring an old hard drive dead, try oiling the stepper motor. This method recently worked for me to bring back one old Western Digital IDE-XT drive that wouldn't initialize at POST to perfect working condition.

 
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