Tibor Mocsar writes re: HDD motor falure:
> Has anybody an idea what to do in such a case?
I have encountered stiction and have several solutions.
However, if there is something wrong with the drive
circuitry, then this is not your problem.
It is common for data recovery people to swap boards on
drives. This will replace the motor control circuitry. It
has to be from the identical drive, but it is not
difficult to do. Get an identical drive. Swap boards. Save
data. Swap boards again, and you still have a new drive.
If you are encountering stiction (more common in older
drives) you can heat the drive with a hair dryer until it
is quite warm, this will often loosen the heads. It may
require a good whack with your hand or rubber mallat in
order for it to loosen. You can also partly disassemble
the drive and physicaly move the disks somehow. Sometimes
spinning the whole drive by hand can jar the heads loose.
I once took a drive apart and baked it in an oven for 12
hours and this seemed to help the platter lubrication
temporarely. This is a special oven which I had
constructed for baking photographic plates, but in
retrospect I think other ovens would do fine. To go that
far, you need to learn a bit of technique, but it is not
required to have a "clean room" although that can be
aranged very cheaply for something as small as a hard
drive. Mycologists do it all the time. If you want more
information on these techniques, e-mail me off list and I
will be glad to help.
For really good information on drives I have found both
the "ibm.storage" newsgroup as well as the FIDO echo on
hard drives very useful. The FIDO is perhaps the best
and there are (were?) some serious data recovery types
lurking there.
Good luck,
Ole Juul
To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message.
Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies.
