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Parking Heads

MrRedHat

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 16, 2012
Messages
75
Location
Wisconsin
I know you’re supposed to park the heads on the old hard drives, but when I got my IBM 5160 there was nothing on the hard drive. The hard drive that’s in there is a Miniscribe hard drive and I can’t see any other identifying marks. I would rather not take it out to flip it over to see if there is anything on the bottom for fear of breaking it.

Where do I find a program to park the heads for it?
 
Some drive manufacturers (and some computer manufacturers) had custom parking utilities for their drives. Although, the generic parking utility mentioned above will work fine. And if you want to have the heads parked.., say every 10 minutes of inactivity, then try TIMEPARK.
 
...and many later drives didn't need to be parked (wouldn't do any good if you did). When power is removed, either the heads are moved to the parking area by the momentum of the drive spin-down or the heads are lifted.

Personally, I've written a couple of parking utilities and never used any--unless I was going to ship a drive or system. In 35 years of using them, I've never had a small hard drive whose failure could be blamed on not parking the drive.

Of course, your mileage may vary.
 
It just varies from person to person with different points of view of to park or not to park the drives. Some people say to park hem, others say not to do it every shutdown. I just park the drives on certain computers I have. The previous owner of my 5160 with an IBM drive never parked the heads, so I don't park it. On others, I always park them. (Maybe I should start parking it.) If you do keep turning off the computer without parking it, eventually a bad sector will form over the spot where the heads land.

Just do not run SHIPDISK (since you have an IBM) from the regular command prompt if you do need to move it. Boot from the diagnostic disk, then run it.
 
Just do not run SHIPDISK (since you have an IBM) from the regular command prompt if you do need to move it. Boot from the diagnostic disk, then run it.

Why not from the command prompt? I don't have any floppies for the machine to run the diagnostic disk. I’m sure I could eBay some. Would there be any particular version I should look for?
 
SHIPDISK must be run under a certain operating environment, which booting from the diagnostic disk provides. (Hence it is an option to run from the disk's main menu.) If not, SHIPDISK can destroy your hard drive.

I think Modem7 also has the disk images of the 5160 diagnostic disk on his site, which is the same minuszerodegrees.net mentioned above.
 
Why not from the command prompt? I don't have any floppies for the machine to run the diagnostic disk. I’m sure I could eBay some. Would there be any particular version I should look for?

Aaha, I don't know what I don't know.

from here: http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcf...94-Low-Level-Format-(LLF)&p=126983#post126983

modem7 said:
Whilst it sounds tempting to use SHIPDISK.COM, heed the warning given in the first edition of Mueller's 'Upgrading and Repairing PCs' book:

"Several years ago, IBM issued a warning to its dealers recommending against running SHIPDISK.COM from the DOS prompt. IBM said that a slight chance exists that you can lose data because the program can wipe out track 0 of the disk. The memo indicated that SHIPDISK.COM should only be run from the menu."
 
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