Posted by: Karsten M. Self
on February 08, 2005 07:05 AM
The problem you're trying to get around is head sticktion. The manifestation is that your disks don't spin up to speed fast enough, and the startup process times out. You can actually hear the disks trying to spin up repeatedly.
Removing the drive, rotating it back and forth quickly on the axis of rotation can free the heads. Best way to do this is to hold the disk flat in your hand, and rotate your wrist quickly. Sort of as if you were, um, polishing a knob.
The key to drive recovery is to try the least-damaging options first. Eg: restart, spin, freeze, mild shock (1"-2" drop onto a padded surface), etc. Some of these actions can actually damage the drives (head crash sucks), so start conservative.
I used the hand-spin method to revive a set of 6 year old drives on a system which had sat unused for nearly a year, following a move. Running fine to this day.
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Posted by: Karsten M. Self on February 08, 2005 07:05 AMThe problem you're trying to get around is head sticktion. The manifestation is that your disks don't spin up to speed fast enough, and the startup process times out. You can actually hear the disks trying to spin up repeatedly.
Removing the drive, rotating it back and forth quickly on the axis of rotation can free the heads. Best way to do this is to hold the disk flat in your hand, and rotate your wrist quickly. Sort of as if you were, um, polishing a knob.
The key to drive recovery is to try the least-damaging options first. Eg: restart, spin, freeze, mild shock (1"-2" drop onto a padded surface), etc. Some of these actions can actually damage the drives (head crash sucks), so start conservative.
I used the hand-spin method to revive a set of 6 year old drives on a system which had sat unused for nearly a year, following a move. Running fine to this day.
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