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Miniscribe (Maxtor) 7040AT spinning but Actuator not moving

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First post, by ReVoxB77

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Good evening,
I‘m currently testing an large quantity of old hard drives from 40mb to 80GBs and I’ve found a drive with the following symptoms:
I have an Miniscribe 7040AT with 40MB of disk space from an croatian VICTOR-PC that does spin and light up, but does not move its actuator and won’t get detected in the BIOS.
I’ve tried running it as an Master or slave, typing in the C/H/S manually, but it just won’t get detected and freezes the system at startup for a while.
It didn’t suffer from stiction nor does it have corrosion of anything else visibly on it.
Obviously didn’t open it up to prevent further damage.
What could be the cause of this behaviour?
Maybe this type of drive (Miniscribe / Maxtor) like many Quantum’s from the 90s, also has rubber bumper stops inside the drive that get sticky and „glue“ the head assembly to it?
Any suggestions or recommendations appreciated!
Best regards,
Robert

Reply 1 of 1, by Horun

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That 7040AT probably does have stuck heads or an issue with it's controller board. Another issue is old tantalum caps shorting but not blowing up causing malfunction...
I suggest you put a note on it, with the problem description and keep testing the other "large quantity" of old hard drives.
After testing them all then go back and work on those that have issues or errors.

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

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