[XCSSA] Harddrive with power connector problem

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

Thanks to XCSSA suggestions, I fixed my drive in classic XCSSA fashion.

I wedged a 1/4" long thin wire between the chassis of the hard drive  
and the power socket.  This seems to push the socket into the circuit  
board just enough so that contact between the socket and circuit  
board is maintained.  (BTW, the "wire" is a 1/4 piece of lead from a  
now-collectible Radio Shack 10 Watt resistor that happened to be  
handy.)  It was clear from an ohmmeter test that the 12V ground  
doesn't quite make contact anymore otherwise.

As long as this "superglue" fix works, I'm not going to mess with it  
further.  Has anyone tried resoldering these connections?  Has anyone  
removed the circuit board from a drive and put it back later?

I'm worried that an attempt to resolder the board/connector from the  
underside of the board could make things worse, for example, if a  
solder bridge got created on the other side.  Then I'd have to remove  
the board, which could break the connector to the drive spindle.

Meanwhile, I've copied all my key data, and plan not to store any  
more new data on this drive.  But since it's a system drive for a now  
historic Win 98 SE system (is that eXotic now?) I hope the drive  
keeps going until I can either clone it somehow or create a new Win  
98 system (which depends if I can still download patches for this now  
unsupported system...and rebuilding a win 98 system from scratch was  
always a slow tedious and often frustrating process and various  
patches and things have to be installed in a particular order to keep  
the registry from getting messed up) so I can keep the old hardware  
and software associated with this old system going.  It's not even my  
oldest.  That honor goes to a 15 year old 25Mhz Amiga 3000, now with  
three harddrives, which I also keep going.

Charles

On Oct 17, 2007, at 6:43 PM, xcssa-admin@xcssa.org wrote:

> Yeah, superglue as a replacement for your fingers w/ 2 connectors
> wired together to relieve the stress on the old socket would be more
> XCSSA style.
>
> On 10/17/07, xcssa-admin@xcssa.org <xcssa-admin@xcssa.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 17:31:04 -0500, xcssa-admin@xcssa.org wrote:
>>
>>> One of my main harddrives has a problem.  It seems to have a loose
>>> power socket which possibly got stressed by accident.  If I hold the
>>> 4 pin power plug in at a slight angle, it works fine.  Otherwise, it
>>> frequently loses power.
>>
>> Sounds like either a cracked circuit board leading to a broken  
>> trace or a cold solder
>> joint where the four-pin connector is attached. I'd try re-heating  
>> the four power/ground
>> connections first.
>>
>> Of course that's not 'interesting' enough for _this_ group, so  
>> I'll sit back and watch
>> the suggestions flow.  --Don
>>
>> --
>> Be well - or at least have interesting symptoms!
>>
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