On Mon, 23 Mar 1998, Allison J Parent wrote:

> <500 such particles per minute, suggesting that trying to get by without 
> <special facility is impossible.
> 
> Your suggesting zip/jaz drives, RA60s, RK0Xs, RM0Xs, and RL0Xs are not 
> possible too as they are similar technology. 

Ooo, ouch.  Wow, what a great way to to illustrate the viability of hard
drive surgerys.  Truly, the JAZ disks look just like an ordinary stack of
drive platters.

I find hard drives to generally be fairly robust creatures.  Some of the
IBM 4GB and 2GB SCSI drives which shipped in the mid 90's with SGI
workstations suffered an annoying stiction problem which prevented the
drives from spinning back up if they'd been allowed to spin all the way
down.  The "fix" was to apply swift and sudden force to the drive.
Generally I started by smacking the edge of the drive against my open
hand.  If that didn't work, I'd move to striking the drive's edge firmly
against a table top.  If *that* didn't work, and I knew I had a good
backup of the data on the drive, then I'd escalate it to dropping the
drive from about 8ft to the ground.

Generally such tactics yielded about a 90% success rate in getting the
drives operational again, even if just to copy everything over to a good
drive.  And maybe 10% of the 90% were from drives that I dropped to the
floor.  Of the drives that came back, we never suffered any read/write
problems.

Fixing drives like this was a great way to expend pent up
frustration as well.  Though I won't talk about what we did with the 10%
that didn't come back to life.

-brian.
---
Brian "JARAI" Chase | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ | VAXZilla LIVES!!!