Re: [PLUG] Fixing bad hard drive

[Guillermo Moyna <g.moyna@usip.edu>]

Jon,

> The drive does spin.  Since I had nothing to loose I took of the top of
> the drive and watched it spin up.  The arm traveled from the center to 
> the
> edge.  When the drive was accessed the arm went back to the center 
> with a
> "clunk".  This could be heard before the cover was removed as well.

One problem of removing the cover is that you let air in, and then 
friction will cause the drive to heat up a lot more (they are 
'vacuum-packed').

> I want to try to replace the controller card to see if this fixes the
> problem.  Has anyone ever done this?  Does it work?  Where is the best
> place to get a replacement?

I've done this so many times with Seagate SCSI drives it's not even 
funny. We bought ~10 machines with identical drives which started 
failing one after another. My solution was to take the controller from 
a good one, put it on a bad one, and 'dd' the data to a new, different 
model/make, SCSI drive of the same capacity. It never failed.

G.

+==================-------------- --- -- -  -    -     -
Guillermo Moyna, PhD
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
University of the Sciences in Philadelphia
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