Re: Focus hard card repairs?

["John" <zzzjoki@yahoo.com>]

> I have an 80 MB Focus hard drive in my IIGS that has died. No lights
> flash, no whirring noises occur. The computer boots from an external
> SCSI drive. Does anyone know of a repair facility that would tackle
> this drive? Its got 3 ProDos partitions that hold alot of  software and
> data that I would hate to lose.

Both of my Focus drives (not the card) failed. I don't recall if the
symptoms were similar to  yours however. Although you may have a dead
card, drive failure is common (high hours on older drives).

You can still get smaller laptop drives. Bill Garber may still have new
drives for the Focus card. I picked up 2 used laptop drives (Conner,
IBM, and Toshiba? work) from a local used hardware shop for around $5
each a few months ago. One has bad blocks at 200+ megs so you might get
an adapter and test them on a PC for a few weeks. Also, the adapter
(laptop cable to std-pc-ide cable) will tell you if your IDE laptop
drive spins up. If it spins up on the PC but not in the IIgs them this
suggests your Focus card is bad. This adapter should be cheap, too.
Bestbuy had some for $7ish and online I found them for $3.50 someplace.


Replacing the drive is easy: remove screws, uplug old, plug new, and
tighten screws. Of couse you'll need the Focus Utility disk to format
the drive. I'm not sure if they are available online (help?). If not, I
can fish mine out and email them to you.

As far as recovery, dunno, except if your card is bad the drive could
be fine. If so you'll need to find someone to preform the recovery.
Probably the easiest is to find someone with a Focus, IIgs, and
removable media that you can use.  Or, maybe ebay a backup Focus and
recover the data yourself - it might be the cheapest option.

If the card is bad you might .... (haven't done this) try tracking down
the guy who use to sell the Focus drives and see if they have any more
cards (Computer Circulation in Oceanside CA?).

If you don't have one already, and if your SCSI card allows it,
consider getting a Syquest or Zip for backup. They are pretty slick for
this.