old ibm hardware is robust?

[amico]

old 286 or 386 pc's is robust?
when i find old computer,it works fine for few days,successively is broken.
i'm not lucky with retrocomputing,at the moment i'm not have machines.
the spare parts frequently broken is the floppy drive.
i think that older hardware is robust...
i have also a very good double conversion unite power supply to protect and prevent the damage by electrical power.
i'm not lucky at the moment...
if ibm have put an auto-destroy program on the bios of older pc's shipped in italy,auto-activating when pc's have 10-15 year old? is possible?

[Sandy Cagle]

old 286 or 386 pc's is robust?
if ibm have put an auto-destroy program on the bios of older pc's

I've wondered that myself, but most the time it was my fault

[rmay635703]

Honestly I've never had a bad floppy in a vintage computer, never even a bad hard drive in a truly vintage computer, but then again I know what to do to restore systems behaving badly, oddly enough you might find the floppy in your vintage PC works perfectly fine if you plop it in a modern box and give it newer media (aka not used up), some drives only like to read disks made within that same drive (out of alignment), also the blasted SS DD drives and 320kb only drives can drive you knuts as they are hard to deal with on modern machines and disk images.

One trick I've found to make older floppy drives work when they don't want to read is to take off the cover, insert media and lock the drive then push the read head against the media, many times bending the head down toward the media makes it read better, strange but I've used it over a dozen times with success. Not sure why that works, maybe the head is weak?

Good Luck

[mbbrutman]

Many Americans think that Italian cars are programmed that way - are Fiats and Alfas supposed to self destruct after 5 years? :-)

Disk drives are the most troublesome part of a machine because they have the most moving parts. Keep the drive heads clean by using a cleaning disk periodically. Keep the drive mechanism clean so that the heads can move back and forth freely to get to the right track on the diskette surface. Avoid touching the drive heads - you can knock them out of alignment.

Also, some drives are just built better than others. Qume drives are notoriously bad. Drives with 'direct drive' motors instead of belts have less problems because there is no problem with belts getting old and slipping.

[chuckcmagee]

Yes indeed. ALL the machines I have had problems with lately have been old Tandy belt drive floppy drives. 4 out of 5 of them had bad belts when they arrived at my front door. I need to figure out the dimensions on some of the belts and make a big order of cassette belts. The cassette belt idea looks like a great one.

[dongfeng]

The main problem I have is also with floppy drives. I also find that drives get very particular - they read perfectly from old disks, but don't like new one?

[mbbrutman]

That is a drive speed or alignment problem.

If the speed of the drive is incorrect (possibly due to slipping belts) or the head is out of alignment, the drive will be able to read disks created in that drive, but will have trouble with diskettes from other (presumably correct) drives.

And of course, the diskettes written on such a drive might cause problems on other drives.

[Mad-Mike]

Ah man, that dreaded floppy drive issue. I go through this one rather frequently with certain drives.

Just about anything with GEM on the front comes in with a bad 1.44M Floppy Drive, it's almost always a Mitsubishi or TEAC, and always drive B:\ on the chain. I usually swap it out with an Epson or a brand new Sony. The worst 3.5" floppy drives I've dealt with are those cheap Mitsumi drives found in a lot of newer (1992-1998ish) White Box clones. And one of the best 3.5" drives I've had was a 720K 3.5" out of an Amdek that came as a 5.25" drive bay unit.

The worst 5.25" drives I've ever dealt with are TEAC. I have a few that work in one computer but hate some of the other ones for one reason or another, one is even a 360K that despises my XT for some reason. The best ones I've owned are the Mitsubishi/Mitsumi Branded models found in Compaq Deskpro machines from the early 80's. I had a 20 year old Deskpro awhile back that had one of those, if it stopped reading, just push the head back, and it'd work properly for another year without a problem.

As far as hard disks go, can't go wrong with Seagate anything except the 5.25" Bigfoot drives from the early 90's. Connor and Fujitsu seem to get noisy after awhile, my 486 sounds like a plane taking off behind a plate glass window, however there's no bad sectors or read/write problems. Maxtor also makes some good hard disks too, like the 7213 and 7120. Quantums are okay, but they tend to start getting flaky after awhile, and the old Western Digital Caviars are great, just keep an eye out for the 613MB models, their jumper settings seem to be mislabeled.

As far as other hardware to be careful of on PC's
- Early soundblaster 8-bit clones that have un-labeled chipsets
- the infamous Trident TGUI-9440 PCI with the default 85HZ Refresh Rate
- Future Domain Dual IDE controllers, they like to fight with Windows 3.1 32 bit Disk Access for control, and tend to conflict with other devices on your system pretty easily
- Tandon branded IBM Labeled full height floppy drives

As for me, I try to get a modern hi-capacity removable media drive on all my own computers, it's pretty easy to get everything on a 286 using a ZIP disk, or fill out an IBM XT using an SCSI CD-ROM.

[rmay635703]

The first thing I usually do is make a boot disk using the drive from the PC in question on a modern machine (I take out the drive and hook it to my big computer) I then copy intersvr and laplink anything utility related I want on the old computer, given the relative speed of my vintage IBM's usual floppy drive and the time it takes if you literally want to install something, installing to and copying to the ibm 5150 using a modern system seems to go much faster even with the slow laplink cable. This seems to be true on most everything 386 and down.

Good Luck