This guide will hopefully help you repair your IBM PS/2 hard disk drive if it is no longer functioning correctly. Vintage, aging hard drives may have plenty of issues, but leaking capacitors on the control board can only make things work.

In my repair I use tantalum capacitors, but as long as the values and physical sizes are the same you can use whatever you wish. The Mouser.com and Manufacturer part numbers for the capacitors I used are listed below. (This list is coming soon!)

I offer repair services for these drives if you don’t want to do the work yourself.

Capacitors Required:

• 47 uF / 16 V (x3)
  Mouser # & Mfr. #
• 10 uF / 16 V (x2)
  Mouser # & Mfr. #
• 6.8 uF / 25 V (x4)
  Mouser # & Mfr. #
• 4.7 uF / 25 V (x1)
  Mouser # & Mfr. #
• 100 uF / 6 V (x1)
  Mouser # & Mfr. #

Download a high-quality PDF of this recapping guide (7.4 MB – PDF)

Are you new to recapping?

If so I highly suggest you watch some tutorial videos and practice, practice, practice! on old junk boards, or something you don’t care about (like a broken VCR, etc).

My friend Bruce has some excellent recapping and beginner soldering videos on his YouTube channel, as well as suggestions of beginner tools to purchase, check him out!