eldred@de_csi.jpl.nasa.gov (Dan Eldred) (08/11/90)
Two days ago my old 20 MB MDIdeas hard drive flunked the smoke test (literally). I partially disassembled the unit and found a Seagate drive with a PC board piggybacked on its bottom (piggy- stomached?), which had a 1 in square heat-discolored area in the vicinity of what appear to be voltage regulators for driving the disk motor. The area had been so hot that several resistors had actually unsoldered themselves and were dangling. I looked for voltages and found zero volts on all three terminals of one of the regulators. I have the following questions: 1. How much do shops charge typically to repair a disk drive? 2. If I wrote to Seagate could I obtain a schematic, and given that, might it be possible to repair the PC board? Or is it likely that a lot of components were taken down? 3. Would Seagate sell me just this PC board? How much? Frankly, I wouldn't be very upset at losing the drive since it is too small, it's not true SCSI, and it's always been a bit flakey, but it would be nice to salvage some of my work that didn't make it to the most recent backup. Which leads me to my fourth question: 4. What are good and bad brands of 80-100 MB disks? I thank in advance all netter who either post a reply or email to me at eldred@csi.jpl.nasa.gov . ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Dan Eldred eldred@csi.jpl.nasa.gov -----------------------------------------------------------------------