Outbound Laptop Capacitor List & Repair Log

It turns out this bodged in resistor near one of the legs of the HDD bracket was shorting against it. I added some kapton tape to it and the machine turned on!

Unfortunately the HDD is now not fully spinning up. It tries for maybe a second before giving up. Tried a bunch of cycles but it hasn't kicked on yet. Hoping I can get it working so I can image it. But worst case I can replace with a ZuluIDE and use one of the images @zigzagjoe posted on MLA.

Here's what the HDD sounds like at boot. A ~1sec attempt to spin while the boot chime is happening.

I connected the HDD's 12V/5V rails to a bench power supply and it still wouldn't spin up and was dragging down the 5V rail. Checked its main board with a thermal camera and found that a L272D at U15 was getting hot. That's an opamp that likely drives the motor. While I wait for a replacement IC, I set up a ZuluIDE V2 2.5 following @zigzagjoe's advice.

I'll post more details once I figure out how to best physically mount the ZuluIDE. But currently, I have it connected with a 10cm 40-position ribbon cable and jumper wires for +5V/Ground.

The bad L272D Opamp @ U15:


Temporary ZuluIDE connection:

A happy Outbound!

Repair update: I did get the old drive working after replacing the blown opamp. It has Outbound software version 1.3b2, which I think is already available online, but I'm going to attempt to image the drive regardless.

As I was working with the machine, I noticed side-to-side tracking was weird. I'd have to slide the ISOPOINT all the way to the right or left to get it to track that way, I took apart the mechanism and found the rubber wheel on the digitizer was disintegrated. I made a new one out of 5mm rubber cord and a 1mm hole punch. As I was trying to install it on the original plastic shaft, the shaft broke. I replaced it with a piece of 1.6mm solder needle which fit perfectly into the spring the plastic shaft sat in. It's not perfect, but is working well enough.

While I was working on that I somehow managed to separate a gear from the up/down tracking mechanism and couldn't find it. Maybe it disintegrated too. No idea. I experimented with a bunch of different gear sizes and found one that worked. It's 12-tooth, .4 module, and 2mm thick with a double-d bore. Printing in ABS-like resin at 102% (x/y) and then clearing the bore a bit with a 1mm round file made it perfectly friction fit the shaft. Hopefully no-one will need this, but I'm attaching the STL here just in case.

The deteriorated horizontal tracking wheel:


The homemade replacement installed:



The missing gear:


The replacement gear design:

I got the original PrairieTek 20MB hard drive imaged. Here's the recipe I used.

Beige G3 desktop Mac with a USB card installed
USB hard drive
USB thumb drive

Burned a CD with Debian linux 8 (debian-8.11.0-powerpc-CD-1.iso)
Put gddrescue_1.19-1_powerpc.deb on the thumb drive
Installed Boot X on the mac
Installed Debian onto the USB hard drive
Installed gddrescue

Unplugged the CD-ROM drive and plugged in the PrairieTek.
Connected the 5/12V lines of the drive to a bench PSU 1A limit for 12V and 1.5A limit for 5V.
Archived the PrairieTek to the USB hard drive
Checksummed it and copied to the USB thumb drive
Copied it to a modern host Mac and checksummed again

Since the Outbound drive is byte swapped, I made another image with it swapped back

Then checked in in terminal

Dropped the image into Basilisk II and it mounted fine.

Pulled out all of the installed Outbound software (v 1.3b2) and made a new floppy image of that, attached below.

I also mounted the ZuluIDE to the Outbound's HDD bracket with some nylon standoffs, screws, and washers.