Antonio Carlini wrote:
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?
I have some RZ28 (2GB?) disks but I don't recall having any difficulties with them. I do have some RZ29B (4.3GB) disks that fail to spin up when requested to unless they are given some physical encouragement in the form of a sharp twist or some vigourous tapping. They can be heard to make a very faint and short purr when trying and failing to spin up but no clicking noises and no data issues. I have more than one RZ26L (1.05GB) disk which I reinitialised and installed a new system on which then failed horribly with nasty clicking noises after working nicely for a very short time. I haven't found any way to fix this condition and I don't know if almost completely rewriting them is what triggered it to happen or maybe it was because of sudden activity after years of idleness. I didn't try freezing them. I also have one Compaq 9GB SCA disk which made heart-stoppingly loud clunks and clicks at irregular intervals but continued to function normally in this condition for several years. I had copied it's contents to a new disk but left it in place to see how it would fail. It didn't. I eventually took it out and examined it, found nothing obvious wrong, put it back in and decided to make an audio recording of the noises it had been making. Of course, it then refused to make any more noises after being disturbed and continues to work normally without any data issues whatsoever. Regards, Peter Coghlan.
