Stiction (was: Atari TT030 install media)

I have a little story about Stiction ... this is not "cyber legend", this actually happened, and I was the one who did it! Way back, sometime in the mid to late 80's, when this stuff was not cheap or easy to come by, somebody gave me a dead Lapine "Titan" hard drive - I think it was a 20meg drive. The drive just wouldn't spin up at all. I tried the "shake and bake" technique, rotating it back and forth about the spindle axis during power up etc. - no dice, the drive just would NOT spin up. So, "this is trash --- lets look inside". Popped the top off, and immediately discovered that the platters did not want to turn. On closer inspection, I discovered that the head did not want to budge to the platter. Memory is a bit dim on exactly what I did, however during my fooling around the head eventually came lose, and I could spin the platter - there was a discolored spot which had been under the head - it was slightly rough due to a bit of surface corrosion or deposits. I don't recall why, but "just for kicks", I took a fine cloth, polished the spot on the platter (IIRC it was still discolored, but I removed the surface deposits). Blew out the drive with a bit of air, and put the top back on, and installed it in a machine to "see what would happen". Not suprisingly the drive spun up right away. So, I low-level formatted the drive and ran a test --- then I got a suprise --- NO ERRORS! This was interesting "I wonder how long it will last", so I left it running surface scans overnight --- in the morning --- NO ERRORS! So I used it for "non critical" data - months went by and I never got a disk error. Eventually I gave the machine to a company I worked for who used it as a lab/test machine, and when I left the place a few years later, it was still going and to my knowlege had never gotten an error. "Clean room ... we don't need no steeenking clean room". Regards, -- dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Vintage computing equipment collector. http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html