Oddball hard drive failure...

I've got a Magnetic Peripherals 94211-91 SCSI drive here where the magnets for the head stack seem to have been coated - at least around the edges - with some form of paint. The paint's now begun to flake off, jamming up the head assembly and preventing the drive from seeking properly (sometimes it wouldn't spin up at all, other times it'd spin up, flop the heads around as much as it could, and then power down again) Anyone seen this particular mode of failure before? It's a new one on me... With nothing to lose (after ruling out other possibilities, and I'd already popped the lid on the drive expecting to see the aftermath of a head crash) I removed the top magnet from the head assembly (without disturbing the heads themselves or their pivot point) and cleaned everything out as best I could. I was doing it more for giggles than anything - but I was amazed when, after replacing the magnet, the drive actually powered up, stayed powered up, and was detected by the OS. It's not in particularly good health - I'm about 14MB into the archive process and I've got about 500KB of dead blocks so far. Doubtful I'll be able to get any meaningful data out of whatever filesystems were on it with that level of corruption, but I suppose it'd be silly not to at least try! cheers Jules