On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Stephanie Ring wrote: Stephanie, you already had your shot but you blew it by not responding to niether the poor guy who has it nor myself when we inquired as to what happened to you. At any rate, it's spoken for. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

How do you know you had a head-crash? Back in the '70's one could SEE evidence of that on the removable pack. One could smell the burnt heads in some cases too. I doubt y ou can either see or smell anything on these IDE types. If it was a head-crash, how would chilling it solve the resulting problems? Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gareth Knight" <gaz_k(a)lineone.net> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2000 3:31 AM Subject: Hard disk Woes have

I doubt that this was a head crash. I think what you're hearing is the heads restoring and seeking repeatedly. A head-crash would not be likely produce a repeated more or less regular clicking. What's more likely is that the drive p*ssed either on a servo track or simply wiped the servo information from the track on which it saves that information. Drives normally use embedded servo infomration that's integrated into the data stream. That means that it could have had this "accident" anywhere, but if it (the repetetive clicking) happpens during the power-on sequence, it's likely that it's in the region where the control processor gets its information about what it's supposed to do. I have about 18 WD drives in a box in the corner, each of which had this symptom, and each of which was replaced at least 4 and as many as 9 times over the 2-year warranty life. Now, though they all work, I'm not likely to use them, since they'll last at most 6 weeks before going tits-up. I'll find a suitable donee, so I can take the full tax writeoff. Your 20GB drive is recent enough that it should probably still be under warranty. Have you explored that? Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gareth Knight" <gaz_k(a)lineone.net> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2000 9:16 AM Subject: Re: Hard disk Woes

Well, it's unlikely you can do that, since it's likely the servo information with which the drive figures out what's what is gone or at least unavailable. That's why there are backups, doncha know! If you don't do regular backups, it's because you don't care whether you lose your data. A 20 GB drive requires a 20 GB-minimum capacity on your backup device. Experience has shown me that if your backup medium doesn't exceed your system capacity, you won't have backups because it's too inconvenient to sit there and wait 12 hours for the job to finish, or because you fell asleep waiting to put in the next tape, etc. If the tape is big enough to do the job, it starts by itself, and it stops by itself, and all you do is change the tape every morning. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gareth Knight" <gaz_k(a)lineone.net> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, December 17, 2000 5:03 AM Subject: Re: Hard disk Woes information

On Sat, 16 Dec 2000, Gareth Knight wrote: In this case, it sounds like it would just cause another head crash and finish the work it didn't complete the first time around :) Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org