>never mind - stiction it is... I got the bottom board off the drive and
>managed to free up the spindle by hand, it now seems to spin up properly
>by itself...
I have a little story about Stiction ... this is not "cyber legend", this
actually happened, and I was the one who did it!
Way back, sometime in the mid to late 80's, when this stuff was not cheap or
easy to come by, somebody gave me a dead Lapine "Titan" hard drive - I think
it was a 20meg drive. The drive just wouldn't spin up at all.
I tried the "shake and bake" technique, rotating it back and forth about the
spindle axis during power up etc. - no dice, the drive just would NOT spin
up.
So, "this is trash --- lets look inside".
Popped the top off, and immediately discovered that the platters did not want
to turn. On closer inspection, I discovered that the head did not want to budge
from the platter surface, and came to the conclusion that the head was stuck
to the platter.
Memory is a bit dim on exactly what I did, however during my fooling around the
head eventually came lose, and I could spin the platter - there was a discolored
spot which had been under the head - it was slightly rough due to a bit of
surface corrosion or deposits.
I don't recall why, but "just for kicks", I took a fine cloth, polished the spot
on the platter (IIRC it was still discolored, but I removed the surface deposits).
Blew out the drive with a bit of air, and put the top back on, and installed it
in a machine to "see what would happen".
Not suprisingly the drive spun up right away. So, I low-level formatted the drive
and ran a test --- then I got a suprise --- NO ERRORS!
This was interesting "I wonder how long it will last", so I left it running surface
scans overnight --- in the morning --- NO ERRORS!
So I used it for "non critical" data - months went by and I never got a disk error.
Eventually I gave the machine to a company I worked for who used it as a lab/test
machine, and when I left the place a few years later, it was still going and to my
knowlege had never gotten an error.
"Clean room ... we don't need no steeenking clean room".
Regards,
--
dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Vintage computing equipment collector.
http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html
Received on Fri May 07 2004 - 05:58:11 BST