first, on the drives that still work, run your' disk utilities, this type of thing corrupts the catalog file and system info terribly.
on the dead drive, remember that when drives spin up they draw a large amount of power, more than some power supplies and more than the motor control electronics on the drive can handle continuously or in rapid spasms. most likely the driver transistors for the spindle motor have shorted, i've seen that before. if you are an electronics geek, you might be able to replace said driver transistors. a better option is to look for an identical model # drive cheap on ebay etc. and swap the controller boards, that should allow data recovery at least but it doesn't completely fix the drive as each mechanism is a little different and the controller is programed for that, but it's usually close enough for recovery. in any case, after recovering data don't try to use the old drive again, it's been badly strained and the spindle motor has probably had it's life shortened or been damaged outright. definitely get a ups, they are sometimes available cheap surplus or if you shop around for last years model. if you don't get a ups, when a brown out or power failure hits, manually turn everything off and run disk recovery later, this avoids the surging problems. it's irritating, but it's the only way to protect the hardware, usually these things seem to come in waves, just leave everything off till things have stabilized again. i have similar problems in winter, just last night we had two power loses or brownouts for 10 or 20 seconds each, but i've got a ups for everything in my room including the stereo and tv, and since i didn't look in the rest of the house i don't even know if it was a complete loss or a brown out, just that it happened and the ups alarm went off. meci.com has some, and there are others that have them cheap, write me off list and i'll send some bookmarks. i'm using a piggish 1kva true sine wave ups, made for ncr, that's available for $200 surplus in the original box! i've never so far come close to it's limit even with 2 macs, 2 monitors, a stereo, and a tv plus a halogen lamp. overkill, but it's nice to have in winter in these parts! it's also nice to have 20-30 minutes of tv and radio usage in case something major has happened, though the last major outage was from a poor dear that jumped the fence and got into the substation, damaging equipment and no doubt making a disturbing mess of things and itself..... get a ups, i'm in wyoming where we always have extra power that gets sold, but the weather and drunks hitting power polls are things that happen everywhere. (we did have one incidence where jerks shot at transformers, letting in the rain and causing problems as each damaged transformer had to be tracked down. i've got a gun, it really irritates me when people are irresponsible with any of their toys, paper targets are cheap, shooting at power transformers is stupid, and they're lucky they didn't hit the coil itself or they definitely would have known, if they were far enough away to avoid injury!). Bruce Godfrey wrote: > > Fellow 1st PowerMac'ers, > > There have been a number of electrical disturbances in my > area recently. They have been complete power failures, and > low-voltage episodes, "brownouts", where the lights dim for a while > and then come back up to normal intensity. I think this has caused > some kind of accumulating damage to my system and I am looking for > advice on how to respond. ----------- -- 1st-PowerMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Sonnet & PowerLogix Upgrades - start at $169 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> 1st PowerMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/1st-powermacs.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> List archive: <http://mail.maclaunch.com/lists/1st-powermacs/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
