>>Jeremy and I used to do that alot on those first generation IDE drives
>>(which seemed to have this problem much more often) back when we were
>>computer techs... It sounds funny, I know, but it worked great most of the
>>time.
>
>If I remember correctly, it seemed to happen with certain batches of
>drivers. Like a batch of WD drivers and then later maybe Maxtor or whatever.
>And there was *always* the same problem in that it would spin up and then
>right back down again at boot (usually the first boot). So I think it was
>more of a shipping or drive problem or something more than anything. But, as
>a last ditch effort it works...
That was a different problem. That's where WD threatened to sue me and my
company when I discovered a LARGE batch of their drives were having failure
rates of nearly 80%. When I got on the newsgroups to see if others had the
same problem, I found some other cases with those same drives, so I mentioned
my problem of 80% and up failure rates...
Well, WD apparently monitors the newsgroups and they contacted me and
threatened me and the company I worked for with a libel suit. Geez.
Of course once they got our bad drives back and examined them, sure enough,
that's when they discovered a problem in their manufacturing that was leaving
silica deposits all over inside the sealed case...the flakes would be whizzing
around inside the drive like little asteroids, tearing the heads and platters
to shreds basically.
So in the end, they did find out that it was a manufacturing problem and I
never heard an apology from them for threating me like that. :( Hmph...I've
never bought a WD drive since and always tell people to avoid them. :) They
did fix the problems with their drives, but in their initial period of denial,
they refused to swap out the drives until they actually failed and I had about
30 screaming programmers I was supporting who didn't understand that WD was
refusing to proactively replace the drives that hadn't yet failed. They
didn't understand why we had to wait for them to lose all their data before we
could replace them, and frankly, they were worried because they'd seen all the
other drives of the other programmers that *had* already died and who lost all
their data. So, thanks a lot WD! :-P
>In reality tho, I think that what is *more* common is the actual controller
>or PCB on the drive starts to flake out before an actual problem w/ the
>platters etc. Usually, if it is a platter/head problem its usually due to
>abuse (such as dropping something heavy on your drive while its
>reading/writing).
At the risk of going too off topic, I do recall that in some cases we were
able to recover data by taking the controller board from another drive of the
same make/model and mounting it on the failed drive. If we were lucky, it
*was* just the old board that had flaked out and we could still recover the
data.
>I'll never forget the times when we would do data recovery of a bad drive by
>putting it in the freezer for 30 mins, which we *theorized* shrank the PCB
>on the HD thus fixing some stress fracture or whatever temporarily (long
>enough to get the data off the drive before it heated back up again).
You know bro, we were the data recovery pros there! :)
Well, it all goes to show you all that you're FAR more likely to have
something besides the CPU die first, so you can just run Prime95 to your
hearts content... just make sure you backup the files because chances are,
your drive will go first. :)
Aaron
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