jxh@attain.Teradyne.com (Jim Hickstein) (08/04/90)
I have a couple of circa-1985 130MB SMD disk drives manufactured by
Applied Information Memories (AIM), of Round Rock, Texas (with an
address mentioned in Milpitas, Calif.). One of them stopped working
after a recent power failure. I can't raise any sign of there ever
having been an AIM in Texas or California, other than the disk drive on
my desk and the manual that I have.
Can anyone tell me where I might find either schematics for this thing,
or the name of an ex-employee? How about a place that fixes drives and
has heard of this thing? I thought that it was dust on the index sensor
(I've seen that sort of thing before) since it was giving me a code for
"Index Timeout", but a can of air later I have convinced myself that the
index sensor isn't optical. It's buried under the spindle rotor, so I
can't really tell, and I'm loath to remove it, although I've given up
the idea of recovering the data from this drive. Does anyone happen to
know whether the sensor is in fact optical? Of course, having taken it
apart (except the HDA), it now gives me a different error: Index Period
Error. *sigh*
I used to go to a place called Calif. Disk Drive Repair (CDDR) in
Santa Clara, CA, which vanished without a trace a few years ago.
Does anybody know where those fellows went? One of them was named
Gary Simbulan. It occurs to me that he might be fearless enough to
give this things a try, schematics or not. I didn't pay a lot of money
for the drive in the first place, it being already three years out of
date (although new in the box) at that time, so I'm not prepared to
spend much money on getting it fixed. But the fact that it's SMD makes
its replacement rather expensive.
--
RF engineer: "It's close. But, I suppose you don't know about 'close'".
Software engineer: "Well... You have 'close'. We have *sometimes*."
Jim Hickstein, Teradyne/Attain, San Jose CA, (408) 434-0822 FAX -0252
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