Nagered hard drive;'(..

Check for loose/bad connectors and bad solder joints.

Try holding the drive (with power applied) and giving it a quick 'flick'
with the hand to overcome adhesion of heads to platters.

Try swapping boards with an identical-model drive.

Check the power connectors* in the PC. It's possible that the drive logic
is powering up (hence the model details are displayed by the PC on boot)
but there's no +12V available to the drive to run the spindle motor. I've
seen it happen.

* actually, check the PSU. I suspect that some systems might run with no
+12V at all, and a lot of PC PSUs don't do much (if any) checking of
their 12V line. If the OP doesn't have a multimeter, any old junk hard
disk could do...

Yes, been there, done that. I usually use a pan of icy water (and
suitable non-conductive layer) on top of the drive rather than the
'freezer trick', but it's got me many a drive running again long enough
to get the data off.

cheers

Jules

 

see e-mail, tony.

 

Not strictly true - high end stuff follows this pattern.

I know HDS use multiple manufacturers (despite making their own drives they
still use their competitors drives) albeit at a rather different level to
the RAID that most people here are talking about.

They use a mix of manufacturers to help avoid firmware issues and higher
failure rates on certain batches (think deathstars...).

Of course, the drives all have HDS firmware etc on them so it's a bit
different

Darren

 

"All drives must be equal" sounds like a great plan until it's a year
or two after you built the squillion dollar Unfeasible Data Centre,
better drives are now cheaper and you'd like to start upgrading to use
them.

....but you can't because they won't integrate well, and you can't
(even if you could afford to) down the whole lot at once to swap all
of them, becasue of course it's an "always on" sort of thing as it's
biggest selling point.

A little later, and you're reduced to skip-diving to get the legacy
parts for it, whilst storage of similar size and performance is
sellign for tuppence ha'penny down the road at PC World.

 

I think this is the point when you call me an effing plantpot.

 

Done, this was a new unit 3 months ago!..

Done sounds if its making the almost right noises..

Well haven't got that far as yet ...

Checked all at 12.05 volts

How would that boot up then, read off the drive etc?..

Bin there dun that no difference..


A mate of mine is having a look tomorrow...

 

.. . . and the rot can spread remarkably quickly. Hours in my experience.

PB

 

Well this one was doing odd things for about a day and then went down
very quickly, mainly odd screen freeze's...

 

You said:

"Ah well that was probably in the days of proper RAIDs.
The ones where it was done bitwise across the disks and all the spindles
and heads were synchronised. They were expensive."

We repeat: it wasn't RAID. It wasn't Inexpensive.

 

Depends on the age of the drive, I've found. In the context of the OP,
correct - but it's not true of all drives, with older (ancient in
computing terms) often surviving for years with a few duff blocks.

(and remember the days when you had to reformat the drive if you changed
its orientation, as otherwise it'd start spewing out errors all over the
place?

cheers

Jules

 

John, you're arguing with 'dennis the erroneous'. Why?

 

Jon Green wrote:

You would *not* have wanted to be in charge of the radio station on a
cruise ship where one afternoon the ships comms started playing up, with
no new drives onboard, and I spent the evening starting to get a copy of
the data off onto another machine, begged the C/eng to get me a new
drive pronto (we were alongside) which he did thank heavens, got some
sleep, looked at it in the morning only to find it was worse, and got
enough off it restart the system when the new drive came onboard. My
experience is the quality of the equipment onboard is in inverse
proportion to the amount of money the pax are paying.

That's why I said when a drive starts to go, it can go in hours. Which
is not funny when it's not part of a RAID setup.

PB

 

In message <hvvpji$gsj$-september.org>, at 14:20:35 on

No, I don't remember that, and I go back all the way to 1980 and drives
that were 10MB per platter.

 

Comes of being so old, I'm afraid.

 

Pah. Newbie.

Blimey. Huge capacity. There's a platter from a Xerox system hanging
on my study wall. IIRC, the drive was 20Mb and had 5 platters. I wish
I could remember what the capacity of the DEDS drive on the ICL 1900
series I learned RPG2 (spit) on was. About 5 Mb (?), with two platters
that had to be exchanged seperately, but in pairs, on a horizontal spindle
inside a *huge* grey crackle-finish enclosure.

Now I have 3.5 Tb of disk in mys study ...

 

Hell, no.

I still have some 5 track paper tape ...

 

Ah, now that's going back a bit. I haven't seen that since I worked on
an Elliott 803.

 

I have an 8-track player.

 

World's best tape readers ... 1,000 cps and could stop between two
characters, quite often without even tearing the tape.

 

Ah, the Good Old Days.

My first machine had a 350M HDD, and I paid over two thousand dollars (USD)
for it. I bought the upgrade graphics/game card that allowed a joystick so I
could play Flight Simulator. It was a bit jerky as the scenery files
changed.

I recently bought a 500G external HDD for $60. I have several Thumb
Drives -- flash drives in some circles -- with more capacity than my first
computer. I bought a 128M flash drive when they first came out for something
like $15, now they give away drives with 8 times that capacity for free to
the first 50 shoppers on Saturday.

It sucks to be a trail blazer. I buy stuff that leads the industry, and it's
obsolete by the end of the month. I bought a flat screen TV a year ago, and
when the store was out of stock on my TV, the next shipment was better and
cheaper and mine was discontinued.