Clicking SCSI disks

[Antonio Carlini]

I have a number of old (2000-era) DEC StorageWorks disks that fail to 
mount under VMS. They report MEDIUM OFFLINE.

They power up in a similar way to other disks that do work, but they 
persistently click ina  "something isn't right" manner.


I've tried reorienting some of the disks to see if that makes any 
difference, and for the ones I've tried, it didn't help.


I've read about the "freezer" trick, but mostly I've seen negative 
opinions. However, those opinions mostly come from data recovery 
specialists!


So I thought I'd tap the wisdom of the list. Is there any way that 
people have used to successfully recover data from RZ28, RZ29 disks 
(which all worked in 2003 :-))? Has anyone tried freezing a double 
bagged drive? Was it successful? If so, how long did you freeze it for? 
These disks are in StorageWorks containers ... should I remove them 
before freezing?



Antonio


-- 
Antonio Carlini
antonio at acarlini.com