On 06/09/2010 03:14 PM, Sergey Manucharian wrote: > Hi David, > > Excerpts from David C. Rankin's message of Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:16 -0500: > >> Before I add the drive to the heap of drives in my 'dead >> drive box' are there any other silver bullets I should try to try and >> resurrect the drive? (Data isn't an issue, it's all backed up :-) > > I had similar situation (just a couple of days ago) with my friend's > USB flash drive, which has fallen dead accidentally being transferred > from one computer to another. The symptoms were very similar. After > half an hour of trying to read outputs and resurrect it I've decided to > disassemble it. The quartz resonator's leg was torn off the board. I've > soldered it back - everything was back - partitions and data. > > This long story is a hint that you may have an electronics failure in > your HDD. Just a physicist's opinion ;-) > > Cheers, > Sergey > I'll take that physicists opinion to heart. With the drive out, I powered it up on my glass coffee table for the usb connection. I have probably powered 30-50 drives like this and you get an 'ear' for whether there are problems with the drive. In this case it sounded perfect. A bit slow to spin up (~ 2 sec lag in spinup), but nothing major. After spinup, the read-write head did just what it was supposed to: uncaged, a quick swing through the extent of its range of motion, then promptly settled and sounded like it was saying "OK, I'm here, I'm ready to read/write like I'm supposed to -- where's the requests?" The drives balance was notably perfect. Being an off/old brand (MTD) I was expecting slop. Nope, it put the new Seagates to shame. If the drive had just cratered, I would expect more noise from the read-write head searching for partition boundaries, etc. (But.... There's not a damn thing I can do to check --> my vacuum chamber is on the fritz :-) I'll dork with it a bit more, then it's in the box with the rest of my collection... -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com
