Stiction (was: Atari TT030 install media)

On May 7, 5:58, Dave Dunfield wrote: [...] formatted the drive I can't remember if I told this story before... I had a machine that ran for a couple of years; never powered off because it was a pain to get the drive to spin again. Well, the inevitable happened, and I had a power cut last August, which outlasted the UPS. This time the usual tricks didn't work, and I ended up taking the drive into the workshop. Even giving it a higher voltage on the 12V supply wouldn't make it start, so with nothing more to lose, off came the top. I discovered I could release the brake by hand, but even so I had to apply 14V (instead of 12V :-)) from a big bench PSU directly to the innards, and flick the disk with my finger to get it to start. However, once started, it would run on 12V, though it wouldn't restart normally if I let it stop. I had to think about how to keep that drive spinning while I took it back to the machine. Don't try this at home ;-) It went something like this: connect a PSU from a PC to the smallest available UPS, and stack the PSU and and the topless drive on the UPS . Start the drive as described above, then whip off the bench power leads and connect the PC PSU before it has a chance to spin down completely. I seem to remember using a paper clip to disable the brake while doing that. Unplug the UPS from the mains and carry the whole lot up to the office, with the drive still spinning. Connect to the computer, cross fingers, and power up the computer. To my surprise and releif, I was able to read almost all of the drive. I only lost a couple of files. Needless to say I replaced the drive after that :-) I've taken the tops off small drives a few times. I don't recommend this, because I may just have been lucky, but as a last resort it's allowed me to rescue the data from a few stuck or damaged drives. Except for the most recent one (I took the wrong screw out and finished the drive off). -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York