NeXT MO Dump Offer

[Gavin Thomas Nicol]

On Apr 29, 2008, at 3:32 PM, Mark Tapley wrote:

> At 12:00 -0500 4/28/08, Gavin wrote:
>> I have successfully repaired a NeXT MO drive and it is remarkably
>> reliable...
>
> Care to post details? I have two MO drives, both of which are (I  
> think) non-functional...

Well, I spent a fair amount of time on it, and I can't say I have all  
the answers, but I had enough drives that I could experiment a bit. I  
found that in general, the interface board on the top of the drives  
doesn't fail, but the board internally can suffer from dry joints, so  
reflowing the solder, looking for whiskers etc. will generally get the  
drives to the point where they will spin up and seek. The other thing  
I found was the linear optical encoder often got clogged and that you  
had to reset the read/write head properly for the drive to work. Apart  
from that, there are a lot of little trim pots that are obviously used  
to calibrate the drive. I have no service manual, so I don't know  
exactly how they work and haven't had time for continuous  
experimentation.

I have a fair number of drives, and was able to repair 2 successfully.