Maxtor full-height 5.25" drives of death

[Ian]

> 
>> On 02/08/2018 12:28 PM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote:
>> 
>> Little concrete analysis has actually been done on these drives that has been released outside the
>> drive recovery shops.

Al, thanks for the thoughtful response- I was genuinely unaware heads could simply fail outside of the obvious catastrophic modes. (I.E. head crashes)

I don’t have a lot of background here- what goes wrong with them?

I do wish that the cumulative knowledge developed by these data recovery outfits was just a smidge more public- and I know there are some outfits who claim to “refurbish” old HDAs, although I have no idea what they actually do.

I’d be very curious if you or any other list members have more insight into how these processes work.

I would like to some day build an SMD and ESDI emulator, but until then there are a lot of misbehaved drives out there- and if there’s anything that can buy them time, even enough to get a good read, there’s goodness there.

- I