10 Mar
2005
10 Mar
'05
6:07 a.m.
At 11:12 PM 3/9/2005, Ethan Dicks wrote:
Board swapping is unlikely to help. Unlike classic
drives, modern
drives put their internal 'firmware' (more like DECmate 'slushware')
on factory tracks. Maxtors are prone to amnesia when they can't read
those factory tracks, or the data on them has been corrupted. The
drive geometry, etc., is _not_ stored in the board.
I have an 80 GB drive sitting on a bench in Palmerston North, NZ,
because of this problem...
I've cured a few clients' drives with the board-swap trick, but
those drives were in the 8 gig generation, not the 80 gig.
It would be nice to know for historical purposes exactly which
vendors and when they started putting the firmware on the platter.
It's the luck of the draw in finding an exact model-number replacement,
though - sometimes I got lucky and found it for $4 on eBay. Not long
ago I paid $120 for a 6 gig refurb-pull from an online vendor.
It's nice when the eBay sellers just scan the face of the drive.
You can rest easy you have a match.
Never having been in one of those thousand-plus hard drive repair
facilities, I'll also add my guesses as to why swapping platters
is impossible. When they build the drive, they clamp the platter
on the hub, then write it with servo information to let it find
its tracks. Swapping platters doesn't work because the two
platters will never, ever sit on the hub exactly the same way.
(That is, the rotational center of the disc will be slightly
different, leading to two dimensions of misalignment.)
The expensive places must have some way to pull a platter with the
valuable info to be rescued, then re-align to find the true center,
then attempt to read the data.
This question is certainly a FAQ, though. It was covered in other
tangents last fall. Do we have a place to put FAQs?
- John