Umm yeah, don't do what I did... and I was even vaguely paying attention. YES -- it is an extremely Big Deal to clean the heads on drives that have been sitting for a period of time greater than their design life! THat was the mistake I made. I did an ordinary clean job, which was grossly inadequate. DONT POWER IT ON AGAIN. If you crashed the removable platter you don't have a total disaster, just a small one. The media is now no good, 99.99% certainty. The heads are probably OK, assuming they were not physically damaged some time in the last decades. I found that counter to advice I had to remove the heads from the drive and do an extraordinary cleaning job with a 10X magnifier. THere was FeO practically fused to the head ceramic. I used a piece of wood ("popsicle stick" aka craft stick) soaked in alcohol, under a magnifier, to physically remove scrape off the oxide blobs. Nothing less worked, including soaking the head face in 99% alcohol. You will need factory technical documentation to do this. Head removal/insertion is rather delicate. One slip (eg. the pair of heads, which are under spring tension towards the platter) and the ceramic-faced heads >>WHACK<< together, ruining the heads permanently and immediately. And so on. It'll all be covered in the factory docs. I'd rate this a difficult job (eg. high skill level) but it can be done; field service monkeys changed heads all the time. Just gotta have docs, go slow, be patient, and use the right tools. That said, the biggest problem will then be, upon reassembly, the heads will be out of alignment with the pack(s) and you will need to align them. This is a Big Deal and cannot be done without an oscilloscpe and again the legendary factory documentation (schematics, etc). There is another solution to the problem which I took -- reformat the media. Of course this means instantaneous data loss. For the fixed platter, if you don't need the contents (eg. you can reinstall from other media) it's a fine solution. For removable media though it's a bad idea unless you're willing to abandon pack interchangability with other disk drives. I did give this up! I have only one removable pack; I don't need portability. If it ever comes up in a serious way, then I'll align the heads. I just didn't feel like undertaking it then. It would mean of course the pack I'm usnig now would have to be reformatted, but that's not a big deal for me. (My drive then died from another electronic failure, about a month later, which I have yet to fix.) If you crash the fixed head, you're screwed unless you can do a platterectomy and replace it. I was able to do this with EXTREME EXTREME CARE, using the platter from a removable pack (hence my lack of spares). The media should be utterly perfect and smooth brown oxide. If you see aluminum, it's hopelessly crashed. Now you could have worn but usable media, where the oxide is discolored or optically discontinuous; what happens is dirt/crud on the head, within non-crash limits, reaches through the air film of the spinning platter and bonks off the peaks of the (micro) mountains of oxide on the platter. It'll take the gloss off... these kind of packs are at the end of their lives and will dirty heads -- at best -- and shouldn't be used. No.

No, but as the RL's use an embedded servo system, you can align the heads using _any_ normal disk pack. There was an amplitude test pack to check the read amplifier, but you don;t _need_ that one. -tony

People, Rather than (a) yelling at someone new for doing something WE know should not be done, and then (b) go on (at length) at WHAT SHOULD have been done, why dont all the experienced head-cleaners on here work together (OFF_LIST !) on producing a HOWTO on this subject: "HOWTO proceed with reviving an Old Disk Drive". That way, the result can be posted, forwarded, archived in the KB, so when people DO bump into this task, they WONT fuck up the disk by just powering it up, but, instead, follow that procedure. --f

Why should it be off-list? Surely repairing/presrving a demountable hard disk is very much on-topic here. I am not sure what good that will do. The sort of person who knows he has to take care and therefore will look for the HOWTO is the sort of person who, if he can't find that HOWTO will ask here anyway. And presumably list members would then give helpful information. -tony

At 01:58 PM 6/18/05 -0700, you wrote: Or if you want to read any pack with existing data. Personally if I only had one pack and one drive I wouldn't waste my time with the drive. Joe It's 2005, not 1975, and that probably no