Flashing LED on old Quantum HDD PCB

Windmill · 2011-12-01T10:54:41+00:00

I have an old 5.25" Quantum Bigfoot CY6.4 hard drive which I want touse in an old PC.It was working some months ago when I hooked it up to a USB adaptor ona Ubuntu PC and backed up its contents.But now it isn't recognized by the OS (various old Linux and new UbuntuLinux versions), neither on the old PC nor on the USB adaptor.'dmesg' shows info for a different drive (which works), but nothing forthe Quantum drive.There's a little green SMD LED on the PCB which is steadily lit atfirst (and the BIOS displays its capacity, C/H/S, etc. so can obviouslyread the drive) but which then begins to flash repeatedly in a patternof 8 flashes - short pause - 10 flashes.Not sure if that could be something built into the firmware, or somepattern of repeated access attempts by the kernel.I've tried it jumpered as master and as slave, and with an old 40conductor ribbon cable and a new 80 conductor cable, on its own andwith a CDROM drive. But nothing works.I'm puzzled. Is the LED a disk activity light? There's something aboutone I/O line being sometimes shared as a 'slave select' and a 'diskactivity' line, but I can't see what that would have to do with theproblem.I have a very vague and possibly unreliable memory of having to tinkera bit, or do something special, when the drive was new, but no clearrecollection.Going to see if I can find any HD diagnostic program which might reportsomething, but meanwhile, does anyone know what the flash patternindicates?-- Windmill, Use t m i l lJ.R.R. Tolkien:- @ O n e t e l . c o mAll that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost

Dec 01, 2011 20 Replies

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stsslr1 6 years ago

Thank you for this conversation and the hints. I have a Quantum drive that had sat for a few years and was giving me the 8+10 flashing. Giving it a t ap got it to spin and allowed the BIOS to detect it. (although I think the drive is totally unreadable now - it had problems before but now will not even boot)

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