At 07:23 PM 11/19/97 -0600, you wrote:
>I have an old drive (my old 1.1_ALPHA drive, Quantum Maverick 540S ;-) 
>that started having problems under MacOS, a few months after it began to
>have stiction problems.  Anyway, Quantum refuses to cover it under
>warranty, since they go by the manufacture date, not when the drive was
>purchased several months later... (on a side note, I'm not going to be
>buying any drives from them for a very, very, very long time...)
>
>Anyway, I decided to try reformatting once again (it never appears to read
>or write anything when I try).  This time, though, the drive won't even
>spin up.  My thought is, since it's out of warranty and going to a junk
>pile soon anyway, why not at least try to get it working, maybe to run
>NetBSD for messing around on an old Classic II....
>
>Here's my question... what should I expect when I get the mechanism apart?
>Has anyone had one apart recently enough to know what to lubricate,
>adjust, whatever, on a drive that won't even spin up on its own, and maked
>clunking noises when spinning up before that (often taking a few hours to
>successfully get running)?

Unless you have access to a clean room, like the ones where they
manufacture those drives in the first place and CPUs and memory and so on,
I'd say, once you pop the cover, consider the drive dead.....  If you get
any particle of dust, a hair from your body, almost anything in the drive,
assuming you can ever get it to spin up again, those particles will
probably get caught between the drive and the read/write head(s) and cause
an outright media destroying crash of your hard drive.  It may not happen
the first time you power up the drive.  Given Murphy's Law, it'll probably
happen down the road, sometime after you think you've fixed the drive,
patted yourself on the back, and started storing data you care about on the
drive.

Anyway, I'll give you a potential, short-term solution.  Several friends of
mine used to work in a local computer store.  They relayed the following
solution to me for drives experiencing stiction.  They used to call these
drives "hammer drives."  Basically, you take the drive out of the machine,
or external case as the case may be.  Disconnect it from everything, power
and the data cables (this can be done with both IDE and SCSI drives, BTW).
Set the drive on its side and strike sharply several times with a hammer or
mallet.  The idea is to jar the drive enough to "unstick" its components,
but don't hit it hard enough to damage the case.  According to my friends
this would quite often turn a drive that wouldn't spin up, into a
functioning drive, at least until the next time the drive was powered down,
when often it wouldn't spin back up again.  Sometimes repeating the "hammer
treatment" would fix it again.  Sometimes it wouldn't.  My friends often
used this to retrieve data from the "bad" drive and once they had the data
they cared about off, they would trash the drive.

As I said, I would consider this a temporary solution at best.  Meaning, if
the drive spins back up when you re-power it.  Great.  You're doing well.
But I would never again "trust" this drive.  It has already failed once,
and probably will again, perhaps permanently this time.  So if you're
comfortable with the fact that you could lose whatever you store on that
drive at any time (which is really true of any hard drive now that I think
about it), and you keep in mind that this particular drive probably needs
to be kept powered and spinning in order to remain useable, then by all
means, use it.  Otherwise, tear the cover off, gut the drive, turn it into
a nice "geek" paperweight and go by yourself a new drive.


DISCLAIMER:  I take ABSOLUTELY NO responsibility for the use or misuse or
abuse of the information contained within this post.  The information
contained in this post was relayed to me by persons of my acquaintance whom
I consider to be reliable sources of such information.  I have never
personally tried the methods described within this post and thus have no
personal experience with them.  Any personal injury, data loss or other
harm that may come by attempting the technique described herein is the sole
responsibility of the you the user.  USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!


Good luck,


Rodney Hopkins
rhopkins@sunflower.com