Date   : Tue, 12 May 2009 10:31:04 +0100
From   : profpep@... (Mike)
Subject: My Rodime Wont Spin

 but my biggest dissapointment is that my old 30Mb Acorn winchester wont
fire up.

The drive has always been very noisy with the bearing/motor sounding 'dry',
and now it seems its too stiff to spin. I can turn it manually, but that's
not enough to get it going. Has anyone had experience of dismantling &
servicing these things, or is it a bin-job?

My suggestion is to check the drive power supply. I have an old Viglen
winchester case, with an Oak interface card and a reformatted Seagate 80Meg
SCSI drive in it. When I first built it, it was very hesitant to start the
drive, (several goes of switching it off and on). I replaced all the
electrolytics in the switchmode with new 105 degree C types, and it now
spins up perfectly. Old hard drives pull a lot of startup current, so that
could be the problem.

I hope the heads were in the 'parked' position when you manually spun it.

If it's one of the really old 'full height' Rodimes, you may well have a new
Door stop. I've had several in old plotter servers which had just 'died'.

Anybody need a full height 300meg ESDI drive? I've got a virtually unused
Maxtor brick here, I was looking to see if I had a Rodime left and found it
by chance.

||\/||ike