On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Al Kossow <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 10/23/15 12:04 AM, Josh Dersch wrote: > > The 2190 does not, and it fails in precisely the same way I've personally >> seen three or four other Maxtor drives of the same era fail: It spins up >> fine, but when it goes to load the heads, it sounds >> like the voice coil positioner for the heads is "screaming" -- it emits a >> high-pitched, quite loud whine/buzz which persists until you power the >> drive down. The drive is unresponsive during this time. >> >> > Sounds like a failure of the positioner servo. It is on a separate platter. > > It should be possible to build something to open the servo loop and > position the heads > externally. One of those projects that I would like to get to some day. I > have about 50 > Maxtor ESDI drives from Apollo's build system that I REALLY want to get > the data off of > and I suspect there will be the same sort of problem with them. > > Hm. It would be interesting to test the servo failure hypothesis; I don't suppose anyone has a service manual for these things so I know what stuff to probe? (Nothing on Bitsavers and a casual Google search turns up nothing of interest.) - Josh
