Sweet! I finally scored an Apple //c external drive! These pop up on eBay from time to time but they’re usually over $100 bucks. This only cost me $50. Now I can duplicate disks quickly without have to swap back and forth between source and destination disks. That’s annoying and very time consuming. With two drives, it only takes about a minute to copy a disk.

It’s in pretty good shape, but definitely needs a good cleaning.













I connected it to my //c and crossed my fingers. I hope it’s not dead. (Worst case scenario, I pull the Apple badge off it and throw it on my Scribe.)

I popped in a disk and entered “cat,d2” to access the drive.



Yes! The drive-busy light illuminated and the disk began to spin.



The contents of the disk were displayed. It works!



I immediately rebooted with my System Utilities disk and started making copies.



Copying disks is so much easier with two drives. I fired off 10 copies in no time at all.

RESTORATION

Taking this thing apart is as easy as removing the 8 screws from the back.



Remove the lid and free the cable strain relief from the back.



The whole drive tray will lift right out.




A pulley? Really?



You can pop out the Apple badge from the cover by pushing something through the hole on the other side of it.



And that’s it. All ready for cleaning.

The cable cleaned up nicely with a little alcohol. There’s still a little rust on the screws, but I’ll have to live with that.



As far as the plastics, I gave them a good cleaning in the sink, but there’s still some marks on it from it being banged against other things. I hope some Oxy bubbling action can pull it out.



It’s pretty cold out today, and I’m out of peroxide. The retr0brite session will have to wait.

More to come....