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by dcminter·10y ago·view on hn ↗
Commodore 64C rather than the plain old 64 I think. Still very impressive! How on earth is that disk drive still working!?
4 comments
Older disk drives are considerably easier to fix, what often fails are the mechanical parts usually springs, gears or drive bands.

And even when you do have a solid state component failure those are usually fairly easy to diagnose and repair since they are all made out of pretty big discrete components.

Not that long ago you could still easily fix a motherboard, these days it's a royal pain with everything being integrated and with 8 or even 10 layer boards the power planes are usually inaccessible to users, and signal integrity is so critical that you can't even rebuilt the vast majority of traces reliably.

10 years ago you could easily replace the power distribution system on a motherboard and even a large part of the chips, I've managed to replace the network chipset on a few motherboards when it blew out because some genius plugged a hot POE ethernet cord into it and the magic smoke came out.

Other than that replacing caps was a pretty standard procedure for reviving old motherboards, even that these days is considerably harder.

The drive for our old C64 developed a thing fairly early on where some spring or other near the back would get out of alignment and the head would stop reading. It basically just needed to be poked back into place with a fingertip, but you had to open up the casing to do it.

After repeated repair requests from frantic seven-year-olds, Dad cut a hole in the back of the drive just big enough to poke the blunt end of a pencil through so we could fix it ourselves. I learned to detect the subtle change in the drive's whirr when it was out of alignment, to distinguish that from any of the other things that could go wrong (corrupt disks, usually).

Mechanics around here are quite resourceful and either know electronics or know somebody who knows it. I would bet the floppy drive got repaired several times.
The drive has probably been re-aligned several times by now, they were never that good. The rubber band on the drive motor probably needed replacing too.
Disk drive? How is the PSU still working? Some C64 PSUs has pretty low lifespans.