So I have an (upgraded from 030) 040 cube with an optical drive in an unknown state. It does not exhibit the "spin up, spin down" behavior, but rather the following:
-Automatic Inject works.
-ROM Monitor Eject (ej or eo) works.
-Drive does not spin up or make any kind of noises, given a 'bod' command.
Limitations:
-This system is not booting to Nextstep currently, unfortunately, so I'm limited to what I can do with the ROM monitor for now.
-The two optical disks I have available are Nextstep 1.0a (which of course won't boot an 040 cube, but I thought I'd hear and see some error messages at least) and a blank, never-opened cartridge.
Any thoughts on how to proceed would be appreciated...
Spoke too soon! After leaving the drive powered for a while, it now spins up when you insert a cartridge.
So the next two questions are:
1) How much heat should a spinning OD put out? I could feel it generating a lot of warmth (the cube was open at the back).
2) Should I cease my experiments and partially disassemble this drive to make sure rubber belts haven't melted due to age, etc?
The MO drive has no belts and the heat output is normal.
The issue you are however experiencing is that like with all of our drives all the small lytic caps have either dried out or leaked and need to be replaced. all of them. There is well over two dozen caps in all.
I replaced all the caps in mine and now it doesn't spin at all! But it does try to seek. I'm looking for another dead drive to test against. Any ideas what might be wrong?
I don't think it's just caps.... in fact for most of the drives I've seen the issue is more with dry joints, bad lasers, and alignment etc. than anything else. That's based on looking at parts that worked and ones that didn't, and differences in drives after reflowing etc.
The drives put out a fair amount of heat... while mine are running you can feel warm air coming out of them. You certainly should *not* leave the drive running unventilated. I did that with one and it never worked again.
I have a fair number of dead drives available if people want them... I have one on ebay right now, but I'd be willing to sell them directly... I think you can get away with flat-rate medium size boxes. I have been successful in taking a number of drives and board-swapping etc. to get a working drive. In fact, I have a couple that I dumped 200+ disks with.
One last word: make sure you put a 'scratch' MO into a drive you're unsure of. I destroyed a good disk in a drive where the laser was screwy before I learned that lesson...
The fact that a recap failed puzzles me, especially since it is not unheard of for NOS NeXT drives to be dead in the packaging. I'm still vouching for a cap problem because there is nothing in a brand new MO drive (besides rubber components and lubricant, both of which the drives lack) that can go after being on a shelf for 25 years years other than the caps which naturally only have a ten year life anyways, especially tantalum ones.
I'm not saying it's not the caps... you can see the obvious signs on some of them, I'm just saying it's not *just* the caps.
I have a new drive that didn't work when it came out of the wrapper, and the caps don't look bad to me. I could try replacing them but at this point I already have working drives, so that's a lower priority than getting a video/keyboard adapter done.