On Thu, 2025-09-18 at 12:23 -0300, George N. White III wrote: > One failure mode for spinning drives is a failure in the head movement > controls > that result in the head contacting the platter. A colleague at work had that > happen > to a drive with important files, so sent the drive to a data recovery outfit, > who > reported that the data was irretrievably gone.
I opened a stuck drive, and found that the drive parked the heads into the centre of the disc rather than off the disc, and the fork of the two heads either side of the disc had wedged itself into the circumference of the disc. Or old drives, bearing seizing up. I have an ancient Amiga 1200 which got used once a year in video production for a very long time (it was very handy for easily writing ident details onto sports recording videos). Each time I took it out of storage the drive wouldn't spin up, but if you knocked on the casing it freed up and worked fine. You could hear the head arm ticking, as it tried something, but no disc spinning up attempts, until given some percussive maintenance. But the other day I had to replace a HDD in a security video system. It'd given a drive read alarm a few sporadic times over the months, but apparently was working fine. Which I wondered if it was false alarming, or just been disturbed by mains power faults. Then it died completely the other day. I pulled it out, and slotted it into a drive dock on Linux, which sort of noticed something was there, but the electronics never responded in any useful way. Gparted, for instance, would just sit there grinding its gears forever. I have my suspicions that it got roasted alive in the security system. It has no fan, and inadequate ventilation holes for passive cooling. The drive is screwed to a metal baseplate, which I suppose they thought would be an adequate heatsink, but the box sits on it and covers it up. It's now suspended on brackets to give more airflow around the entire box. But even if the lid was removed, which I don't recommend because the lid protects against accidents with foreign objects, I suspect that passive cooling would still be inadequate. I think I'll have to bodge in a fan somewhere. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 4 14:43:51 UTC 2024 x86_64 (yes, this is the output from uname for this PC when I posted) Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
