I read a few articles that indicated one contributing factor was that Iomega left out a part to save money in some drives which prevented the read/write head from retracting too far, which is what caused the drive itself to fail. As I recall at the time, there was a specific set of serial numbers affected by the COD and a recall of those drives, which makes sense. I have had the same SCSI drive since 1996 (including routinely moving data back & forth between PCs) and never had a problem with it nor the used USB drive I picked up at a flea market. I've found a few places on the web that provide a step-by-step on how to recover a drive which has failed due to this cause. Obviously a damaged head is not recoverable.
I have only experienced the COD on my SCSI drive resulting from one disk, following my mounting it under OS X Disk Tools which suggested "minor repairs", which I foolishly allowed. Sadly, something was corrupted so badly that I have not been able to recover the data on that disk, but the SCSI disk makes the COD as it attempts to mount the disk repeatedly. This is easily remedied by reformatting the disk. I suspect that corrupt data resulting from going between a Mac & PC may have rendered a disk unreadable and produced the clicking sound which was not actually the COD, in as much as the drive itself had not failed, and led to this larger urban legend as people were pre- disposed to blame COD. I would recommend never performing any disk maintenance under OS X, or a PC. Instead maintain the disk in the vintage environment. I found with one corrupt disk I needed to reformat, that neither my USB ZIP, nor the SCSI ZIP via a PC SCSI card on my OS X PowerBook would reformat the disk. Only the Mac Plus with the 4.2 driver would correctly recognize and reformat the drive. But simply mounting the disk and reading and writing data to it under OS X has never been a problem. FYI, now that Snow Leopard has dropped HFS write support, the ZIP disk will mount directly under SheepShaver and allow HFS reads AND writes. If OS X 10.7 drops HFS completely, ZIP may be the only answer for easily managing vintage files without an intermediary Mac – I've heard USB floppy drives won't mount under SheepShaver (anybody?). Not sure how Windows 7 will treat HFS abilities. I've heard Apple has only provided read-only for Windows 7, but the legacy HFVExplorer may still work. Then again, Windows users will most likely stick with XP and Microsoft will be forced to provide legacy support it for years to come under its future OS, so maybe not such a big deal for PCs. Ironic that Microsoft currently provides more support for vintage Macs than Apple itself. On Sep 25, 9:03 am, Britt Dodd <[email protected]> wrote: > Click of death is caused by media being torn and/or obstructions on the > media which cause damage to the read/write head. The 'Click' is actually the > head retracting to its home position in an attempt to self-clean it, then it > tries to read again. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
