Falcon maintenance

[rju]

[*] The hard drive spins but I hear no head seeking. My guess is that either the heads are stuck or the electronics are busted. Conner CP2088, 80MB. I'd be interested in getting that to spin again just to retrieve whatever is on there, so if anybody's dealt with one of these that seemed dead, I'd like to hear your experience.

If the drive is similar to CP2064 and heads are indeed stuck in parking position:
- You can try holding lightly head assembly away from magnet using for example your finger at the axis, during spin up
- Or try this fix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2_jwJGGprk

Both worked for me with CP2064.

[stween]

[*] The hard drive spins but I hear no head seeking. My guess is that either the heads are stuck or the electronics are busted. Conner CP2088, 80MB. I'd be interested in getting that to spin again just to retrieve whatever is on there, so if anybody's dealt with one of these that seemed dead, I'd like to hear your experience.

If the drive is similar to CP2064 and heads are indeed stuck in parking position:
- You can try holding lightly head assembly away from magnet using for example your finger at the axis, during spin up
- Or try this fix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2_jwJGGprk

Both worked for me with CP2064.

So this prompted me to revisit. I popped open the lid, and the head was pretty stuck. I nudged it loose and closed it again, and spins, and it reads! The falcon actually boots from it, so it appears good.

I'd prefer to spin the disk as little as possible, and instead just image it. For the old HD in my STE, I can connect it via a horrible USB to SATA cable, which itself is connected to a SATA to IDE adapter. That works great for the STE.

But the drive from the Falcon isn't working through that bridge. Instead, linux complains about a "Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16). Using 0xffffffff as device size." So my host systems can see there's some sort of drive attached, but I can't get anything out, yet.

[Plagued]

Could you get a second hdd hooked up? I had a similar issue with an old SCSI drive, gave up trying to image it on a PC, so in my case I installed a CF/IDE adapter in the falcon and used kobold to copy the files off the SCSI onto the CF drive directly, was surprisingly quick.
You could go internal to external if you have a scsi drive. I've seen people testing the cheap bluescsi adapter designed for Amiga, but not actually seen anyone confirm it working on a Falcon, tempted to get one myself.