On Wed, 19 Nov 1997, Rodney M. Hopkins wrote:

> 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.

Like I said, the drive'll be in a dumpster otherwise anyway.  I may ask at
the computer center and see if they have such a setup, though I won't hold
my breath....  Otherwise, I'll probably do my best with whatever's lying
around... maybe work with it in an area with zero ventilation and/or air
movement... and of course, use rubber gloves, short sleeves, and
basically... if it can't be fixed, no harm done.  If it works for a while
and crashes... no great loss... after all, it'd mainly be using the
MkLinux box as an NFS server for everything but its root partition anyway. 
:-) 

> 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.

Smacking the drive used to get it working when there was mild stiction.
Now it doesn't even make a noise except an occasional thud.  Reads and
writes appear to fail (maybe the head arms are jammed, too...).


Later,
David

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