Parking a hard drive - Really old computer

So I vaguely remember needing to park hard drives years ago when moving computers.... Company I'm doing work for has a computer that is roughly 20 or so years old. It is pretty much one of a kind now, as it has certain software on it that is not available, has no support, and really no one else uses anymore. But the software in it connects to an external machine that tests batteries. We are now going to sell this to a company up north, but it's imperative that nothing happen to the computer during shipping.

For computers that are this old, would we need to park the hard drive? Even though I remember the concept of parking, I don't think I've ever actually used it.. even when moving a computer from many years ago.

We're going to take the entire system (computer and battery tester) to UPS to have them pack it up and ship it, but wanted to see what else should be done, if anything, to have the ship be as safe as possible.

Thanks.

Older hard drives do not have the ability to park themselves, i.e. remove the reading arm from the surface of the magnetic disc. Modern hard drives will perform this automatically when the hard drive spins down.

To park your ancient drive, it will depend on the model and age. If it has a Stepper Motor Positioner to control the arm, you will need some software to force the arm into the parked position. If you do not and the drive is truly ancient, you will need to manually detach the read/write head from the platter. If you do not have the expertise and/or equipment, you will almost certainly destroy the data.

Is there a way to determine whether it has a Stepper Motor Positioner, or if I need to park the hard drive? I will be heading out to the plant tomorrow and can look up whatever info I need to look up.

Thanks.

Are you able to locate the model and manufacturer? It will most likely be an IBM or Seagate. I cannot recall the differences in appearance in very old models.

I used to use a program called SHUTDOWN.EXE back in the good old days of the IBM PC XT (the first model with hard drives) upto the early 386s. By the way, does your machine have a big red switch in the back right corner. SHUTDOWN.EXE would draw a big red switch in text mode and flip it to signify that it had parked the heads.

Thanks for the replies.

I'll take a look tomorrow to see what I can find as far as model and manufacturer.

@scorpions4ever: I'll see if there's a red switch when I go in tomorrow.

An easy but not very safe solution,
Remove hard drives and carry them vertically, so if the box you carry hard drives hit to the ground
reading arm will only move back and forth, however reading arm will not hit on the disk.
there is much less possibility for the HDD to got damaged from lateral forces.

For an irreplaceable system that is not something I would like to test.

Couple of you guys have an erroneous idea of how hard drive heads work. Unlike floppies, in operation, the head does not touch the surface, but flies slightly above it. Parked or powered off, it rests on the surface.

If you don't know if it's parked, or have any software to park it, write a small program to seek to one higher than the maximum track (cylinder) number. This will put the head over unused oxide. Then power it down. The head will not move to adjacent tracks because of the mechanical disadvantage of the seek mechanism.

Right. My wording was a little off. The actuator arm is moved away from the data zones and onto the Landing Zone, or Contact Start/Stop zone as it is now called. Which, as sizablegrin mentions, is a zone containing no data.

You may be able to contact the manufacturer, if you can locate them, who will most likely still have a program that they will guarantee to park the drive.

Did you have any luck, hiker?

shipzone was one command I remember, and I think parkzone was another, in the root of the C drive look for something starting with ship or park, and if there's nothing there, then follow the path to see if there's anything there.

First thing I'd try to do is create a copy of the drive, even onto floppies if needs be, even twice, just to be sure to be sure

There were investors at the plant yesterday, so had to actually do some work, and today I only got like 2 hours of sleep, so dont feel like working today... But I'll be back tomorrow to check to see if I can find model/manufacturer and such...

Thanks for posting back...

@Ax: I'll look for those commands. In regards to copying onto Floppy, the Floppy drive doesn't work... and we were trying to avoid opening it so we didn't actually mess something up (cable gets pulled and breaks something, etc.... not sure how fragile everything inside is as it is so old...).

Thanks.

They weren't all that flaky back then, but hey, it's your call

Yeah.. I know... Didn't mean it was flaky, but if somehow something broke when trying to open it making the computer inoperable, then we'd be out the 6 grand they are giving us... Why chance it when they already know the floppy doesn't work..