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