[ILUG] Hard disk failure

[Michael Watterson]

Niall O Broin wrote:
> On 14 Jun 2007, at 20:03, Michael Watterson wrote:
>
>> Dunno, had more success warming a drive.
>
> You're special :-) Your experience goes against all the wisdom you'll 
> read about, and against the physics (as a drive warms up, and they do 
> get rather warm, both electronic and mechanical parts will expand and 
> this can lead to things going out of spec. 
Surely they are spec'd for normal running temperature, 45 deg C not -21 
deg C? I'm a great believer in Physics though.
> It's not at all unusual to have drive problems which occur after a 
> machine has been on for a little while - when the drive has warmed up.
True
I'd agree a serious chill ought to make every thing looser. It depends 
want the problem is though.

Well they were old 2G SCSIs that had sat in attic. They wouldn't spin 
without warming.

Also a company assembling PCs and formatting drives circa 1992 in a very 
chilly warehouse found that there was a lot of bad blocks, to extent of 
boot crashing. When the PCs where left on for 15 min for drive to warm 
to normal temperature, and formatted there was no problem. About 40 PCs

I'd guess modern glass platter drives are different.  I just replaced 
the 5 year old 40G drive in my laptop  with a  120G. I have  360M, 13G,  
2x 30G and other 40G drive knocking about. With a bit of a search you 
will find a matching drive.  I used a desktop PC with both drives 
plugged in on adaptors and partition Magic to copy. I'd only use 
Partition Magic on a 100% OK drive.

The little torx screw drivers are same size and sold cheaply for DIY 
phone LCD replacement. Usually the PCB unclips simply when the screws 
removed.  Much easier than fixing broken packet dependencies :)

-- 
Mike