> 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 can
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
Received on Sun Aug 23 1998 - 11:07:23 BST
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