I did a similar thing with the old Seagates that had marginal power supplies; not enough current to break the stiction on a cold boot.
After unbolting the drive from the PC I didn't have to open it. On power-up I would give the drive a fast twist in the plane of the platter. Once or twice would get the platter spinning and then you could pull off the files. You just had to get it spinning before Windows looked at it. Mike - AA8K Tim Ellison wrote: > Back in the last century, the 10 MB (that is right, MB not GB) IBM "fixed > disks" that can with a high-end IBM PC XT (oh, those were the days, a 4.77 > MHz 16-bit processor and 512K of sloooooooow RAM) would have their bearings > seize with no warning. Obviously, no spin = no bits. I had gained a > reputation for getting these puppies to spring back to life long enough to > disk copy the contents from one HD to another new one. The trick was to peal > off the protective foil covering on top of the drive housing (which had DO > NOT REMOVE boldly printed on it - what an invitation!) exposing the platter > spindle. Then using a high precision, brand new #2 pencil, shove the eraser > into the spindle and spin it when the drive was powering up (the correct > direction of the rotation was my trade secret). This had about a 95% success > rate, but you could only do it one or at best two times. Eventually some > crack pot engineer realized that Teflon bearings were superior to nylon and > put me out of "business". Oh, the good ol' Halcyon days of the mid 80s when DOS was King and .... > > > -Tim > _______________________________________________ FlexRadio mailing list FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ FlexRadio Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
