I agree that there is no cure for stiction but on the older 3 1/2" FF HDD's I used to gently nudge the spindle flywheel under the drive board. This would free the head of the platter goo and typically the drive would spin up and boot at which point a complete backup was made. ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Re: I'm Back! Author: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu at internet Date: 8/23/98 1:25 PM > certain hard drive of mine won't spin up unless whacked firmly > against a table? Is there anything I can do? This is a laptop

Actually an ex-friend of mine had a technique to 'sticky' drives. The theory goes if it's hosed anyway and you need to get data off it, you

do things to it that you wouldn't ordinarily do and what do you have

At any rate, I've used it before and it seems to work on X percent of drives that are totally stuck (especially ones that won't start up

when whacked). You put the drive top-down (circuit side up) on top of

nice toasty monitor and just leave it there for several days or weeks.

don't know if this loosens up some lubricant, expands whatever's

or what but if you take the drive off the monitor and hook it up immediately and start it up immediately...occasionally you can get it

spin up and give you your data. The opposite of this is a drive I had (old Miniscribe 20 meg SCSI)

would run for about 2 hours, overheat and 'shut down' (it wouldn't

down...it'd just start giving errors and was generally useless). I

it was heat because I could extend the time-till-shutdown to about 3 hours by pointing a small muffin fan at it. I had NO money at the time...except for rent money I was flat broke...and couldn't afford to replace the drive and...seeing how it was 1991 and I live in the backwater state of Iowa, nobody would loan me a replacement. The Mac

it was in was also out of warranty. At any rate, since it was winter it was cold outside so I wrapped the drive in a plastic bag, sealed it up with duct tape around the SCSI cable, set it on the ledge outside the window, closed the window

squishing the cable and sealed up the crack with duct tape. Left the machine and the drive on for something like 2 months that way (though

memory is a bit rusty there) until I could save enough money for a replacement. I was worried about condensation inside the bag but it never caused a problem. At one point, the drive slid off the ledge

was dangling by the SCSI cable and power cable but the duct tape held

firm. It ran like that for several days until I noticed it wasn't on

ledge. On a related subject, I've seen and had several Syquest 40 meg drives that wouldn't work and wouldn't work and wouldn't work until you

them upside and then they'd work just fine. Not the cartridge...the whole drive. Which reminds me...I worked at a typesetting shop once and a guy from another department walks in and tells me he's accidentally formatted

syquest cartridge and is there any way to get the data back? So, with

room full of people who knew better I told him, "Oh yeah...if you just flip the cartridge over, that'll run it backwards so that if you

it again, that'll do the reverse of formatting it and you data will be back." I figured he'd know I was kidding but he DIDN'T and starting walking away to DO IT! I stopped him fortunately and recovered his

with proper tools. Of course, a couple months later he thrashed the innards of a $1500 magneto-optical drive by jamming an 80 meg syquest cartridge into it REAL HARD. I patiently explained to him that when

hear snapping sounds and grinding metal you're generally doing

wrong. Anthony Clifton - Wirehead ------ Message Header Follows ------ Received: from lists4.u.washington.edu by smtp.itgonline.com (PostalUnion/SMTP(tm) v2.1.9i(b5) for Windows NT(tm)) id AA-1998Aug23.132549.1767.58958; Sun, 23 Aug 1998 13:25:49 -0400 Received: from host (lists.u.washington.edu [140.142.56.13]) by lists4.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW98.06) with

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Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1998 11:07:23 -0500 (CDT) Reply-To: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu Sender: CLASSICCMP-owner(a)u.washington.edu Precedence: bulk From: Wirehead Prime <wirehead(a)retrocomputing.com> To: "Discussion re-collecting of classic computers" <classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu> Subject: Re: I'm Back! In-Reply-To: <57d773ed.35dfd743(a)aol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.1 beta -- ListProcessor(tm) by CREN