🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <11...@bridge2.ESD.3Com.COM> m...@bridge2.ESD.3Com.COM (Mike Smith) writes:
>I bought a Seagate ST251 for an AT that would occasionally be ignored by
>the machine at power up.  Turning the machine off and kicking it (after the
>disk spun down) would usually revive it.  It turned out that the screws
>mounting (and grounding) the pcb to the disk unit were loose.  Hitting it
>would re-establish contact.

I used to have kick-start disk drives around here all the time.

Our CS department bought a batch of off-brand 20M hard drives for their
office PC's.  Almost all of the drives developed the same problem.
Sometimes, when turned off, the drives would spin down and stop in a
dead spot of some sort.  Then when the PC was turned on again, the drive
wouldn't spin up.

The solution?  Open the cabinet and take out the drive, but leave the
cables attached.  Turn on the power and SLAP the drive on the side.
Spun right up every time.  No problem.  (If the disk won't spin up,
the data is gone anyway.  What could it hurt?)

Eventually I figured out how to pick up a PC, turn it on, and bang
one corner of it against the desktop in just the right way to make
the drive spin up.

We eventually replace all of the drives.

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