26 Aug
1998
26 Aug
'98
3:24 p.m.
O'Toole's Rule states that Murphy (re: Murphy's Law) was an optimist.
I'd do a regular backup in anticipation of the inevitable. I had a Mac
SE with a stiction prone drive that finally died after a couple months
of nudging. The heads can only take so much before they are hopelessly
out of alignmnent.
Marty
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Subject: Re: Re[2]: I'm Back!
Author: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu at internet
Date: 8/26/98 3:51 PM
Well, mine still works. It just needs a nudge once in a while at
boot up. Is it going to get worse or can I use it for a while?
can
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
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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
drive.
>>
stiction. nothing you can do about it.
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
to lose?
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
even
when whacked). You put the drive top-down (circuit
side up) on top of
a
nice toasty monitor and just leave it there for
several days or weeks.
I
don't know if this loosens up some lubricant,
expands whatever's
sticky
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
to
spin up and give you your data.
The opposite of this is a drive I had (old Miniscribe 20 meg SCSI)
that
would run for about 2 hours, overheat and 'shut
down' (it wouldn't
spin
down...it'd just start giving errors and was
generally useless). I
knew
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
SE
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
without
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
my
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
and
was dangling by the SCSI cable and power cable but the
duct tape held
it
firm. It ran like that for several days until I
noticed it wasn't on
the
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
flipped
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
his
syquest cartridge and is there any way to get the data
back? So, with
a
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
format
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
data
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
you
hear snapping sounds and grinding metal you're
generally doing
something
wrong.
Anthony Clifton - Wirehead
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