Clicking SCSI disks

[dave.g4ugm at gmail.com]

No success freezing a drive. Might help with your problem. I wonder if the head has stuck to the rubber bump stop.
Freezing might make it less gooey and let it free off. Or you could try this

https://hackaday.com/2015/10/13/macintosh-hard-drive-repair/

put you really should only open drives in a clean room...

Dave
G4UGM

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Bill Degnan via
> cctalk
> Sent: 07 September 2020 18:39
> To: antonio at acarlini.com; Antonio Carlini <a.carlini at ntlworld.com>; General
> Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Subject: Re: Clicking SCSI disks
> 
> On Mon, Sep 7, 2020 at 12:57 PM Antonio Carlini via cctalk <
> cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> > 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,
> If there is no stiction then tapping the disk or opening to spin the disk
> manually does nothing useful IMHO other than expose the surface to dust.
> It could be that you need a new controller, you could always try a transplant
> of the controller electronics from one drive to another to dump the data.
> Has to be the same type of drive, etc.  It's all a percentages thing, you might
> save one out of 4 swapping around electronics.  If you have nothing to lose
> and you don't mind possibly making it worse ...
> Bill