Reviving an old hard drive with some oil
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.พ. 2025
- Quick video on taking a non functional MFM/RLL (ST-506) drive and reviving it with just a few drops of oil. I was recently given this Leading Edge Model D and found the original drive to be dead, so I went about doing my oil trick to get it working again. Unlike my last video on the topic, this drive is actually not working before starting.
Fuji Electric Co., LTD
FK309-39R
RLL 30mb ST-506 3.5" hard drive
-- Video Links
Original video on reviving hard drives with oil: (from 2017!)
• Method to revive hard ...
PC Archeology: Leading Edge Model D
• PC archeology: Leading...
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"gear thingy thingy thingy" - its the high level of technical talk that keeps us coming back ;)
Love your videos and the fact you now have a second channel
Best wishes from the UK
Point of fact on the "many hard drive companies". There was a publication, subscription based, that was called the "Hard Drive Bible" that was was a binder that was kept up to date with all the available drive settings they could gather. Head, Cylinders, Tracks, etc. I think it was updated yearly or bi-yearly. Just pages and pages of HD settings
When I first started in computers. It was on the book shelf and one of those books you needed to have. Life before the internet. Or was it just set the 40meg to type 17? To many years ago. LOL
SpinRite was the number one tool back in the day for keeping the data fresh and it could also change the interleave on disks that was incorrectly low level formatted (and all this while keeping the data safe). It can also find bad sectors or reinstate previously marked bad sectors. Invaluable for old MFM, RLL, ESDI and SCSI drives. Later when drives had their own error correction and when SMART was introduced the need for SpinRite wasn't that big any longer. I worked for a company and before delivering brand new PCs to customers all drives had to go through SpinRite (on maximum level) as well as several rounds of CheckIt Pro loops with serial and parallell port loopback dongles, RAM, ROM and other tests to ensure quality in the delivery process. I believe SpinRite 6 is last (and probably final) version of SpinRite.
Fuji (Fujitsu)‘s hard drive division was bought out by Toshiba 10+ years ago. They certainly were around for a few decades, though.
Did you know Fuji heavy industries manufactured Subarus?
Way to go!
I would recommend using synthetic timepiece oil instead of bearing oil. It will seep in better and last a lot longer. You can get it with a *tiny* needle dropper that might even get inside the bearing somewhere.
Holy crap! That menu system after the computer finally booted... It looks exactly like what I had on my first computer. An old 8088 clone we lovingly called "Rudy". Had a 25mb HD. I think it must have been the same harddrive, too, because I recognized that front panel on the Fuji. We even had an amber monitor. The brightest setting was always called "Cyan", so I honestly thought that bright amber colore was called "cyan" for so long...
LOL, Larry & the Land of the Lounge Lizards :D
It's "IN" and "AND" :) I would love to see Larry 1 running on that machine!
Fuji Electric was a joint venture between the Furukawa Electric Company and Siemens, which was related to Fujitsu and not Fujifilm from what I can tell.
Fuji Electric still exists en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuji_Electric
However Daewoo Electronics, the company behind the Leading Edge brand, went bankrupt in 1999.
Great video! I love those old drives and indeed some drops of oil can bring it back to life. thanks for sharing.
Vielleicht könnts ihr zusammen was machen! Probably you both could do a co-op!
There's a set screw visible on the inside of the hub right by the red marker line. Loosening that will allow it to come off. Using a hydrolic press to press it on would probably destroy the motor in the process.
That ring thingy on the stepper motor axle was probably put in place by cooling the axle, causing it to shrink a little, and heating the ring, causing _it_ to expand a little, then placing the ring around the axle; once both parts were back to normal temperature, the ring would be firmly attached to the axle.
I did a little looking around on Wikipedia, and it does seem that Fuji Film, Fuji Electric, and Fujitsu are indeed connected, even though they may appear as separate companies.
Spinrite was definitely a tremendous tool on these old things.
Nowadays it's more of a hail mary but that ability to change the low level format was super smart.
Fujitsu was a major player in the 14" through 8" SMD/IPI hard drive generations, but slowly lost their way as the market moved to 5.25" and 3.5" drives. My first ESDI drive was a FH 5.25" Fujitsu.
"Let´s turn it on one more time so you can see it was not a fluke" ;)
Got a weird click on one... a little movement on the axle... a smooth seeking motion on three... and we got this booted up. Yeah, some overlap between those TH-cam fandoms is to be expected :)
Back in the day, I worked on the IBM PS/2 line and their 160MB SCSI drives. One time, a seized unit came into the office. Popped the controller board off and saw the spindle. A few drops of 3in1 oil and it worked great (although it wasn't happy with all the spindle noise)... I was able to recover all the data - very cool
Leisure Suit Larry. Classic!!!
i hope you get a good copy of those apps and games, cool to see it boot, would love to see a video on all the software on that computer :)
so many memories watching this. just awesome
That's the exact version of the Model D that my parents sent me to college with in 1985.
Great tip Adrian! I have a few "dead" MFM drives I really need to take a look at that have since been replaced with XT-IDE / CF. I'll have to try the bearing oil technique! 👍
As is often the case with second channels, I prefer these to your main channel output 😁
Love the 2nd channel videos - very cool! Keep up the great work!
I would absolutely love a walkthrough of the programs and games on there!
7.14 MHz? That's the magic Amiga 500 frequency 😍
Must have something to do with the NTSC frequency which I think PC's run a derivative of.
Crystals used in TVs were cheap due to mass production. Computer manufacturers did like those crystals a lot.
Fuji Electric is the leading electrical transmission company in japan. Like Siemens Electric is to pretty much the rest of the world. When you said that name my thoughts were "WOW, They made hard Drives?"
Is it all part of the Fuji Heavy Industries like who used to make Subaru cars -- and tanker ships?
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Fuji Electric and Fuji Heavy Industries, which now goes by the name Subaru Corporation as of 2017, are not connected
Ah OK thank you for the clarification
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 FHI changed their name to Subaru Corporation in 2017. Fuji Electric is big, still around and made that drive.
Fuji Electric was actually started as a joint venture between Furukawa Electric and Siemens AG. So you're actually not far off.
Ah, Leading Edge. Never used them, but have fondness for them due to their sponsoring Computer Chronicles for a while :) so I associate their name with going and watching the old episodes once I learned they were all archived on TH-cam.
Great trick to get that drive working.
I really like those drives. I have a SCSI version in a IIcx. They sometimes develop stiction though but if you apply power and rotate the thumb wheel slightly it'll spin up. Like most stepper drives they don't auto-park the heads on power down so you'll need software to tell the drive to park (or wait long enough for the drive to idle park after a few minutes) before powering down. Stepper drives smacking into a stop at power up isn't unusual if the heads were parked upon power down; MiniScribe's 8425 (commonly used in the Mac SE) does it too.
Also, Fuji Electric still exists and builds components for use in other manufacturers' hard disk drives, among other (mostly embedded) devices; they sell few to no devices to consumers under their brand.
Yeah I noticed this drive does have some stiction issues too -- noticeable after it's been sitting for a while. Unfortunate as the drive is completely working perfectly otherwise.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Apparently stiction is caused by polished head sliders (polished either at the factory or from years of CSS cycles) landing on the glassy surface of the media. There, and especially in presence of moisture, the surfaces adhere. It may be possible to pull the armature out of the HDA and lightly texturize the sliders with extremely fine sandpaper to reduce the problem but no guarantees it would work and the problem would recur eventually anyway. Newer (mid-90s or so) drives avoided this problem by having a dedicated landing zone that was both outside of the data area and was texturized (usually by a laser). Of course modern drives (roughly post-2000 for notebooks, post-2006ish for desktop/servers) use ramp loading heads so stiction really isn't possible without being subjected to a major shock.
I can remember the Fujitsu drives back in the day. I have also worked for Fujitsu so here is the wiki as Fujifilm is a different company. In Canada they sold through CCL. Then merged with ICL.
Fujitsu Limited is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services company, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu was the world's fourth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, after IBM, Accenture and AWS, in 2018.
Good job Adrian! well done. I have seen you use this method over and over again and that does work. Although you probably also do know about the 'Freezer' method of restored HDDs back to life temporarily so that you can recover data. I would love to see a video of that working. I have done it myself and it does work, at least to get data from old HDDs.
I have a drive that will only start when warmed up.
I’ve always made special electronic bearing/bushing oil from equal parts marvel mystery oil and synthetic lucus mucus oil additive and then a pinch of motorkote. The solvent marvel helps break up crud you can’t get to and the synthetics are great and long lasting lubes
Great video, I really enjoyed it thanks
fuji electric company is still around. not making hard drives as far as I know, but you might recognise one of their major subsidiaries known as Hakko
Hey, 10K subscribers in little over half a month. That sounds really well! Hope most main channel subscribers will soon join the sub-basement!
Nice save!
I'd love to see some of the data on that drive. There's nothing quite like being a digital archeologist
Yeah a few people have asked. I'll check it for any personal data and then I'll probably archive it somewhere.
富士電機がHDD作っていたのは初めて聞いた。
傍系の富士通ならよく聞くけど。
This is the first time I've heard that Fuji Electric was making HDDs.
I've heard a lot about Fujitsu, but not the other way around.
Hey Adrian, I just got done rewatching the original Leading Edge archeology video I guess just as you were uploading this! Anyway, here's a reminder to dump the BIOS and bring the newer version back over to that system (if you've still got it). You had downloaded a BIOS for another system that you found online to get the XTIDE card going, but I imagine you'd probably rather have the actual newer Leading Edge BIOS in there!
Wasn't there a locking screw on the side of that brass wheel mounting thing? Removing that should pop that thing right off the shaft.
Don't I remember you saying you'd make less videos? I wished I had your work ethic. Greetings.
There was a hole on the side of the spindle thing, grub screw holding it on or an oil port? Can't tell from the vid, but worth a quick look to see what it is... :)
I remember one of the first half-height 20mb hard disk drives made for the pc was made by Tulin. I paid about $750.00 for one for my company. Couple years later when I upgraded the pc I wanted to swap the Tulin into the new pc. At that time you had to set the hd parameters in the bios for the drive to work. I called Tulin to get the specs (number of cylinders, heads, etc) to use the drive in the new pc. They told me that was proprietary information and they would not tell me. They said I just need to buy a new hd. Somewhere I found the info, perhaps on the original invoice, and got it to work. But I remember telling them at that time if that is how they supported their product, people like me were not ever going to buy another drive from them, and they would soon be out of business. And they did go out of business, bankrupt. But the drive continued to work flawlessly for many years.
I would first try a blast of WD40 spray to unjam the bearing and THEN use the bearing lube once you get it unstuck. I once used motor oil to lubricate a fan that got jammed in my refrigerator after cleaning and polishing the shaft and the fan jammed up again in just a few hours. I then used WD40 only and the fan has been running for years now. Though WD40 is more of a cleaner/restorer, so to speak, than a lubricant really, I was surprised that it worked MUCH better than the oil alone! In your case though, I would still use the bearing oil after the WD40 has done its unjamming/cleaning just to be safe. Lubricants containing Teflon are supposed to be very good as well. I also believe that there is a WD40 LUBRICANT as well that is supposed to be better at lubrication than standard WD40 is. I think that it is silicone based. 🤔
All those old brands... Conner, Miniscribe, Maxtor, Memorex....
Now there's just 3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers
I didn't even know Toshiba was still making disks, TBH!
I AM ENJOYING THE STEPPER MOTOR SOUND AHH!!!
shocked you got an old 10 meg or less drive working . THose suckers were not made to last all that long and were not all that great at not screwing up data sooner or latter . I ve used them back around 1993 back when you need to know things becasue there was only computer BBS and no real internet. Cool you got it working again.
So much love for obsolete computers ;)
I don't even mess with hard drives anymore, but if I did it would exclusively be western digital. My 10 year old computer had a Samsung 830 512GB and later an additional Samsung 840 512GB. My new computer has dual Samsung 980 Pro 1TBs. I'm planning on adding in an additional Samsung 870 QVO. I do have room for 1 more Samsung 980 Pro if I want.
Fujitsu was established on June 20, 1935, the fact that makes it one of the oldest operating IT companies after IBM and before Hewlett Packard, under the name Fuji Telecommunications Equipment Manufacturing, as a spin-off of the ***Fuji Electric Company***, itself a joint venture between the Furukawa Electric Company and the German conglomerate Siemens which had been founded in 1923. Despite its connections to the Furukawa zaibatsu, Fujitsu escaped the Allied occupation of Japan after the Second World War mostly unscathed.
Fuji Electric isn't Fujfilm. (there is Fujitsu also. No relation)
According to Wikipedia, there's a historic connection between Fuji Electric and Fujitsu. The telephone division of Fuji Electric was spun off as a separate company in 1935. That company eventually became Fujitsu.
Hmm maybe named after Mount Fuji , Japans tallest mountain ?
@@AdyHewitt In Fuji Electric's case, it's a contraction of Furukawa-Jiimensu. Jiimensu is Japanese for Siemens.
Theres only a few known brands still left really, Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Hitachi/HGST (Bought out by WD now however many of the old factorys are still up and sell them with the HGST branding still) Toshiba bought out Fujitsu which is the company that made this drive. I think Toshiba also bought out some of Hitachi's 3.5 Inch department. Leaving the 2.5 Inch side of things for WD to buy.
Good job
Looks like there is a set screw on the side, that locks it in place. Did you try that?
I was going to say, there is a grub screw holding it together.
If the switch housing is ABS... You could drip some acetone on the seam to chemically weld it together.
Recently I was annoyed by a plastic housing with a broken clip. I lightly pressed the edge of my hot soldering gun into it and now it stays shut.
fuji electric is still around, been in business for almost 100 years.
Sad to say... yes, I remember all those old games when I worked at Kodak when they first came out!
I'm surprised they didn't make some sort of cover for that wheel thing to keep dust out. It ought to be fairly simple to make 1, though if you're planning on transferring the data to something more modern then it may not be worth it.
The first hard drive I purchased was a 340 MB Conner
Someone dropped a deuce in Adrian's Digital Basement!
your Autofocus is jealous. it wants some Bearing oil too :-)
Having recently done some video work, I can say: Autofocus is often brain-dead. The alternative is to manually focus everything, which means it won't adapt to movement of the object or anything in front of it.
You really can't win. This is why professional video has a human being at the helm to pull focus manually and dynamically.
@@nickwallette6201 and a different person from the camera operator to boot! One person to frame the shot, someone else to focus. And neither of them are making the creative decisions, as that’s the director and the DP. (So of course you get clueless people saying “why do you need so many employees for such a simple task! Autofocus exists y’know! This is so wasteful!”, lol)
It looks something more like an internal worm shaft, ie, like the worm drive in a floppy drive, that is dry rather than the outer stepper bearing. I wonder how it moves the head internally.
commenting here to re-post my idea for channel name: adrian's digital attic, for the ideas that never made it down to the basement!
Adrian's Analog Attic
Ah, mechanical drives...
We had gotten a large number of Groupe Bull computers (a partnership between Zenith/Heathkit and some French firm) at University in the 1990's, and right away we had trouble.
They ran fine, were pretty compact and quick for desktop machines at the time, but you could never turn one off!
Well, you could, but good luck having it start again!
Stiction, the tendency for the read/write heads to cling to the platter, was the death-knell for every one of the 87 Bull computers we had!
The fix was simple: while the drive was making its click-whirr-click noises at startup, you lifted the computer up three inches, and let it fall to the table.
Worked ever time; only took a dozen or so 'calibrated drops'. No big deal...
We eventually replaced all 87 drives.
Fuji industries makes a lot of things, also cars (subaru) and big ships, electromotors.
Also made film etc.
Anyone know the name of that menu software? I had an 8088 when I was younger, and it had a menu just like that.
Great work on the drive btw!
The old betting oil in the stepper motor trick lol
I was gonna say: "Wait, don't move that arm when the drive isn't spinning! You are going to cause scratches and bad sectors." (since air cushion separates the head from the drive platter of spinning disk) So the drive was marked as having no bad sectors and how it has over a hundred.
I have this drive, it's spinning, doing seek test, responding to controller, but no moving heads while trying to low level format ): What I can do?
There is nothing like an Amber monitor!
"but if you don't like it, thumbs down!" what happened to the humble Adrian?!
Leisure Suit Larry on such a business oriented PC? Whoever previously owned it must have enjoyed letting their hair down when they weren't working.
Yeah it's odd too, the monitor was monochrome so I'm not really sure how well the game would even work. It has "Hercules" type graphics but that's just black and white.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Do you think you might demonstrate how the game looks and plays on that computer in the future?
I did this oiling once a day for days on one hard drive with a stepper motor as shown, but there was no change. Any advice?
tfw Adrians Digital Blurbs
Pretty much Fuji Electric Co. is what is "Fujitsu" today.
Good video. I have installed thousands of drives from the 1980's forward, and I don't remember seeing an external gear like that. Am I suffering memory loss, or was it that rare?
A really miss maxtor's HDD. I really don't know what clicks with that particular brand (which drive that we owned or i worked with), but in my mind maxtor is symbol of times when we got a choice. Really not connected with theme of video (only with opening part about multiple brands)
Did Fuji Electric change their name to Fujitsu?
so it looks like not fuji film, but is related to fujitsu
If they had oil in them from the factory, then it's probably absorbed a good bit of dust and maybe moisture by now which turns it into something closer to glue. Generally speaking, the best solution is to fully disassemble, break out the brake cleaner spray, get all the old oil and crap off and replace with fresh oil. That'll last 😉
Old drives were assembled with really tight tolerances. I haven't tried to disassemble any lately, but I do have old MFM drives and I wouldn't dare dissemble, unless nothing else worked. When PCs first came out... well the only example I have a price for is the 5MB Apple Profile hard drive which was $3,499 US in '81, which in today's dollars is $10,700. That price was in part for precision engineering, and I'm not confident I can match that in my basement worktable with brake cleaner. If I have the choice, I'll take the chance on just adding new oil.
@@squirlmy You mean tight clearances? Part of quality and precision engineering is ease of assembly. The better they hold a tolerance at the plant, the easier it is for everything to just come together nicely without any manual fitting. Since you wouldn't be removing any material (old sticky grease doesn't count), going crazy with the brake cleaner (provided there are no plastics nearby to dissolve) - not a big issue, but I get what you're saying. If tou don't trust yourself to put it back together right, then you're right, you shouldn't be tearing it a-part.
thats not an Allen lock on the side????
Can you use spinrite on Syquest 44mb, 88mb, 200mb disks?
now I want to know what those games are. lmao
VIM Sticker, Retro Hardware, but using Windows and a Apple Smart Watch. That very contradictory. But nice Retro Hardware! :)
I don't have an Apple watch -- it's an Amazfit GTS ..... Windows works better for me because all of the things I need to do generally requires Windows. Linux would require me to jump through hoops to make it happen. (Like run a VM of Windows anyway)
There are also still Toshiba harddisks prefer them compared to WD, Seagate…
Samsung also has a few.
@@nilswegner2881 well I think Samsung sold it’s HD division to Seagate I think therefore I did not mention them ;), also still have some Samsung drives…
www.ibtimes.com/samsung-sell-hdd-unit-seagate-14-billion-460929
Toshiba,Seagate and Western Digital are the only ones left manufacturing hard drives
Why another channel? The other one wasn’t good enough for you?
It seems that according to you the hdd is made of alot of 'things' and you use alot of 'things' on it :-)
My favorite part is when he used the thing to fix the thing.
He's not wrong.
Did you back up the data?
They are now Fuji/xerox.
playthrough some classic games on here! Leisure Suit Larry is a CLASSIC !!
Sadly none of those were working right -- LSL needed the original disk and the others need a color display. Maybe I'll make a follow-up with a different monitor :-)
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Yeah maybe you could do a retro game slot just once of some old games you've come across on the systems.. Always great content, whatever you show !!
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Maybe 'turn on color graphic emulation' could help with needing a color display. Just a random little idea. ;)
NIce video tho.
MFM. Yeah, about that acronym... "Modified Frequency Modulation" was an absurd contrivance. Don't believe anyone who tries to tell you that's what it was intended to abbreviate.
MFM **REALLY** meant/means "Maybe Four Minutes".
Those stepper motors all have sealed ball bearings, it is impossible to lubricate them from outside, as the sole purpose of a ‘sealed’ bearing is to keep the lubrication material inside the bearing, and this means it is not possible to force it in from outside. I have seen your previous video, which unfortunately you use it as a part of your intro, it is nothing more than you are giving it a little wiggle to make it move and spread the lubricant inside the ball bearing to get it going again.
If it's like the WD (originally Tandon) drive in the previous video, the bearings just have metal shields. (This is also the case in every voice-coil head actuator I've seen.)
Those keep dust out (at least those particles bigger than the gap), but aren't liquid-tight.
I'm sure that, soon as you confirmed the drive working, you packed the whole of its contents into a disk image... right?
Is this channel available on Odysee?
No, not yet, only my main channel at this point. I'm working on mirroring this one.
Fujitsu?
Other way around, Fujitsu is a spinoff of Fuji Electric according to Wikipedia.
@@FnordOok very much this.
@@FnordOok, ty for explaining!
Basically four mech hard drive players left. Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba. That’s it I’m pretty sure
Hitachi (HGST) got snapped up by Western Digital.
@@bdwilcox yep, they still existed for a while after the aquire but then they merged, the only surviving series is the enterprise tier UltraStar which replaced WD Gold.
Which leaves us with 3 players.
WD, Seagate and Toshiba.
green monitor > amber monitor
Yall need to stop with all these extra channels man. I can barely keep up with the original channels.
What original channels or 'all these channels'? This is the 2nd channel, I don't think he has any others set up (yet). :)
most popular youtubers(yes, you're popular adrian!) have more than 1 channel, gotta have a backup
@@brianv2871 he mentioned having a /// as well, but that’s just a parked URL and name with no uses yet.
Other people would build a clean room in their basement, carefully take apart the drive and precisely lubricate just the right spots with the exact right lubricant in exact quantities. Not Adrian, he just kind of dumps a bunch of oil in and man handles everything for a while. Clearly not an engineer.