8 Nov
2010
8 Nov
'10
4:06 a.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
The classic case of that is a demountable hard disk
with headcrash
problem. It will damage any disk inserted into it, and those damaged disks
will then casue headcrashes on any other drive they're tried im.
Some indiots end up damaging every head and disk in the building..
That actually happened to a friend of mine years ago. He is/was far from
an idiot, just unlucky. The first headcrash was silent, so he did not
realize there had been one, put the pack in another drive, went on to
copy another pack and moved that one to a third drive. By that time, the
first pack had started to destroy the second drive, as witnessed by
nasty sounds coming from it. But by then it was too late, the other
drives started making nasty noises as well, and 60 heads and three packs
had been destroyed. DECs entire stock of replacement heads was exhausted
at once and they had to wait for a week while more heads were shipped in
and the techs worked repairing the drives. A whole department of
programmers was idle for a week.
And as I said, the damage wasn't noticeable until after a little while
when it was too late.
/Jonas