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Bernoulli Box A210H (10+10) drives not spinning up.

J

jhuyett

Member
Joined
Jan 13, 2017
Messages
34
Location
PA, US
Hello All,
Recently picked up a Bernoulli Box and having an issue...

While it does power up and I am able to hear the fan, no lights were coming on when inserting a cartridge.
I cleaned out the air filter and do feel it is getting good airflow.
Opened it up everything looks clean. Checked the PS without any drives connected: While voltages vary wildly, I'm seeing peaks of 4.2 and 9.2 on the 5 and 12 respectively.
Tested with one drive connected to power and the drive does not appear to spin - though I am able to easily spin it manually.

Before I tear more apart than I need to, looking to see if anyone has any advice.

Thanks all for reading.
Regards
 
The low voltage on both should have been a red flag.
Powered it up with a drive attached and checked again. Not sure how I missed it, but the PS is making a clicking noise. The variable voltage is likely due to it's cycling on and off.

Would love to find a schematic or any advice as to what to look for. Caps look good and I'd rather not replace them all.

Regards
 
Thanks for the suggestion Dave. I sent an email and will see whether I get a response.

Since it's 5 and 12V, checking my stash to see if I have a mini/ micro ATX/ ITX PS to test the functionality of the drives themselves.
Would still prefer a fixed original and crossing fingers for the schematics.

Regards
 
Double check the drivers. Not sure what kind of hardware or OS you're trying to communicate with, but I've noticed while playing with a SyQuest drive under windows 9x, that it recognized the drive and assigned a letter on its own. But it wouldn't spin the drive or show any signs of life until I had the correct drivers installed. I'd wager that Bernoulli drives behave similarly.

I remember it being deceiving because it gave me the option to access the drive after it assigned a letter, but it just froze the system for a bit while the drive sat there doing nothing, then failed.
 
Hello SunSpotter,
Running this on an IBM 5150 (PC)/ 5161 (Expansion Interface) /DOS6.22 setup.
In this case, the drives should spin up even before the computer is turned on. There's a few YouTube videos (I think one was even from mbbrutman) showing these in operation where the drives light up once a cartridge is inserted.

Regards
 
Jhuyett,

I have quite a bit of experience refurbishing these old Bernoulli drives. Obviously, you need to get the power supply working and running quiet. Do not put a disk in these drives until you have cleaned the head, bernoulli plate, and inspected the rubber / cork gasket that drives the disk from the spindle motor. If you are lucky, you got a rubber drive spindle. I've enclose pictures on what they look like. The motor with the rounded edge seem to have a rubber drive interface; the motor with the square edge seem to have the cork interface. The cork will have degraded as shown in the pictures. If so, this is tough to replace. I've tried it, and have a bit of a process; but, it is hit and miss. Any deformity on the spindle motor to disk interface will create a standing wave on the media; throwing the disk off of the head; not allowing data to be read or written where the wave is.

When you do get the motors spun up, they will howl for quite a while. This is normal. You can heat the spindles with hot air to distribute the remaining grease in the motor.

IMG_0552.jpg
IMG_0551.jpg
IMG_0550.jpg
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When you get the drives apart; be very careful not to scratch the bernoulli plate. Any scratch will destroy the media when used; and thus the drive.

Let me know what kind of spindle drive you have....pray for rubber. Then, we can see how to get these drives up and running.
 
Hello ktmchrisv,
Thanks for the detailed response.
> Obviously, you need to get the power supply working
That is unfortunately still an issue. I planned on testing with a mini/ micro ATX/ ITX PS, but I got sidetracked. Plus I'm a little nervous I'll make things worse.

Thanks again and I'll definitely post if I run into issues once powered up.

Regards
 
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