Restoration of a Macintosh SE
// One hard drive was injured in the making of this.
I know that I said I would release the SE restoration all in one week, but life got in the way. I am doing this as a hobby so I'm not gonna put tight schedules on releasing anything. I'm gonna write as things and if I miss anything along the way so be it.
Also I don't like how wrapping text looks on mobile so I'm gonna stick to blocking like I had it unless necessary. So heres the story of how delidding a hard drive can lead to some interesting results.
When we last left off, the Macintosh SE was turning on, however it was not booting from the internal drive. Knowing that the drive was most likely dead, I proceeded to perform a series of experiments that most would consider very unorthodox. I am going to say, I had no idea what I was doing. So take this whole section with a grain of salt. I did it because the drive was completely dead with no hope of being fully functional again.
With all that said let's get to it. I started by removing both the drives, which required the logic board to be removed. With everything out I cleaned the floppy drive for good measure, left the eject mechanism alone. Somehow it was still functioning and I didn't want to let out the magic fairies that are doing that. 
During my troubles I kept receiving this error. The drive wasn't being recognized? after closer inspection I realized the drive wasn't making any noises. No spinning or anything. After doing a bit of reading I found people who take the plunge into delidding their drives and freeing the head from the rubber bumpers. However that's only for a specific type of drive. The drive that I had was even older. It had a stepper motor and more closely resembled a 5-1/4" floppy drive in design.
With nothing to lose I decided to try fixing the drive. I quickly realized if I turn on the SE with the drive plugged in the head did try to seek, but the platter refused to spin. I decided to give it a little tap and the disk began to spin! However my troubles were far from over.
The Disk was spinning however it wasn't able to written or read. Which is the whole purpose of the drive. With some more research I found that the Teflon coating on the disk gums up over the years causing the heads to basically glue themselves to the disk and be unable to float on the surface. Every time I power cycled the drive the disk would get stuck to the heads and need a little push to get spinning again. I knew this drive was dead. So I figured Why not experiment a little.
The only problem I couldn't use the drive if it turned off. When the head parked after about 10 minutes they would stick to the platter once more. So I did what any sane individual would do.
~Ian L.
I borrowed the SCSI drive from one of my PowerMacs and installed System 6 onto that. I also have a FloppyEmu on order. The drive experiment is finished for now, but I am gonna come back to it and see if there is a way to apply a new Teflon coating to the platters. The drive in my eyes was dead before I opened it. If I could figure out a way to repair them it an attempt for some people to try to recover their old data, then I did my part and if it isn't reliable enough. Well atleast the drive went out with a bang. I'll probably find a use for the stepper motor though, Maybe I could fix an old 5-1/4 drive that has a busted stepper? Only time will tell.
Oh and Part 4 is coming out for the Tandy soon. Almost everything is sorted there.
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