[ How do I fix stiction? -- is that even a term??? ]

Rodney M. Hopkins wrote:
 
> 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.

I don't know if I'd ever actually take a hammer to the drive unless you're
willing to kiss it goodbye immediately thereafter.  I've generally found
that disconnecting the drive entirely, holding careful in my hands, and
then rotating it back and forth quickly in the same plane as the platters
works for me.  Sometimes you can hear things move around a bit if you do
this.  If you hear things grind when you do this...well, it's shot.  Also,
if you shake it in odd ways, you can break the internal mechanisms, so be
gentle (but not too gentle).

Keep in mind that this has worked for me on 1 older Quantum drive (one of
the 80MB LPS drives that often had this kind of problem).  I cannot
guarantee that it'll work for you (I had a friend who managed to destroy
the same drive doing the same thing...but I think he probably shook it a
bit too hard :-)

Good luck.

-- 
Colin Wood                                 cwood@ichips.intel.com
Component Design Engineer - MD6                 Intel Corporation
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I speak only on my own behalf, not for my employer.