dead disk?

[Thad P Floryan]

joi at cbnewsc.ATT.COM (joy.m.metcalf) in <12154 at cbnewsc.ATT.COM> writes:

	Last night I shut down my 7300.  This morning it won't boot.  After
	watching it make little patterns in a row on the screen again and
	again, I inserted the diagnostic floppy.  It said it couldn't read
	anything on the hard disk-- oh, yeah, first it automatically asked if
	I wanted to reconfigure my hard disk, then I told it to run
	diagnostics on the hard disk. 

This sounds like a classic case of the ol' stiction problem, where the heads
won't leave PARK position and the drive won't spin up.  I've over 10MB of
notes, emails, postings, etc. I've posted over the years to multiple newsgroups
over the years concerning the problem.

Assuming your power supply IS supplying a "good" +12VDC to the drive, the
usual solution is to access the underside of the hard drive (meaning you
open your system and pull out the HD), locate the stepper motor shaft (which
is usually located off to one side (contrasted with the main drive spindle
shaft which is typically in the center of the underside of the drive)), place
your finger on the shaft and twist back and forth a wee bit ... this "breaks"
the stiction and permits the drive to power up.

Once your drive is up and running, backup all your files and locate another
drive to replace the present one (whose problem WILL get worse).  The stiction
symtom is one of overlubrication of the platters during manufacturing, and the
only other solution besides total replacement of the drive is to re-platter
your existing drive ... this is often NOT cost-effective for drives under, say,
80 MB.

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]