I have a SD-2 sitting here that looks perfect. I plug it in and the light flashes 7 times. I briefly opened it and the mechanism looks very nice. This guy is REALLY clean. It just doesn't work.

I knew nothing of these drives before searching the net. When I turn it on it flashes 5 times and then keeps flashing 7 times.


Does anyone wish to make an offer?

Where are you?

I live in a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri.

The drives have suffered cap leakage, and need repair. It's not easy to do. I ended up sending one of my drives to Ray Carlsen for repair, it had actually eaten traces underneath some of the ics. I love my SD-2, it's what I use on my pet.

Quote:

As old as they are, this series of MSD disk drives have all developed a unique fault. There are two PC boards on the drive mechanism itself. The top one is the disk controller board and the one on the bottom is the spindle motor drive board. Between them, these boards have about a dozen small electrolytic capacitors that must all be replaced. When these old caps leak their electrolyte, that corrosive substance eats away at the copper board traces as well as nearby components. The damage is sometimes hard to see but corrosion in the area around the caps is noticeable if you look carefully. Symptoms may range from sudden inability to read or write, to complete failure of the mechanism which is indicated by 7 blinks of the LED on power up. Even if the drive is working perfectly now, those mechanisms are all affected and must be reworked before damage to the board makes repairs even more difficult later.

Later,
dabone

Does Ray still do these type of repairs? Do you have direct contact information for him

I think he still does, he did the repair on mine last year.

Here is the link to his web page.

http://personalpages.tds.net/~rcarlsen/


later,
dabone

Great! Thanks. What did he charge to do the repair?

Same thing I was going to ask I have 2 units I know for sure one needs repair
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leaky caps aint that bad to fix
just clean the board and run kynar traces(if needed) and replace the caps
job shouldnt take long at all
at least it dont take me long

I think it was 35 + shipping, I not quite sure. As for a standard recapping, yeah no problem, but try as I might I couldn't find the bad traces on the drive I sent to Ray, I wasted several hours on it, and he the repair god he is, fixed it.


Later,
dabone

Ray has a repair article for MSD SD-1 and SD-2 drives on his website:

http://personalpages.tds.net/~...RS/MSD.txt

(this is what dabone quoted from earlier... good info there)
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Hi guys, if one of you is still looking to acquire a SD-2, there is one available here : http://www.ebay.ca/itm/110906625552

For that price, does that broken drive come with a free SuperCPU ?