Re: [tlug] Potentially Dying Hard Disk Questions (Dropping HD's...)

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

A. Sajjad Zaidi wrote:

>Hard drives are quite sensitive and can develop bad sectors from even
>the slightest mishandling or accidents and sometimes just by being under
>heavy use for a while. Almost all the drives I have owned have shown
>some signs like these within two years.
>  
>

I just stubled on something I wrote back in 2000 about one of my junk 
computer projets:

The Dell laptop computers...  As I said I would at the top of this 
letter, when I got home from my overly long time in the tunnels, I 
pulled the Pentium Dell out of the closet, took off the broken 
screen/display, and tried hooking it up to my desktop monitor with the 
battery from Dell #1 (the only good battery of the three).  Why the 
battery?  Because the AC hookup for the Pentium Dell is different from 
the other two 486 Dells, and it didn't come with a power supply.  
Anyway, the machine worked fine, so I tried to put the display from Dell 
#2 onto Dell #3, but unfortunately, the display plugs are not the same, 
so I was forced to abandon that idea (discovered after a lot of work 
breaking down the two machines into pieces).

Now for the fun.  The #2 Dell came apart relatively easily, but didn't 
go back together very well... so the hard drive had to be shoved in with 
some force.  I thought it was odd, so I pulled it out and retried it a 
few times... managing to drop the drive on the floor once...  After I 
tried firing it up, sure enough, dropping it ruined that drive.  It 
functions, but makes the most awful noises I've ever heard any hard 
drive make.  Pulling out the (suddenly) useless hard drive, I looked 
forlornly at it and noticed a sticker on the back of it that says 
"Otosanai de kudasai" ("Please don't drop"), and another fine line of 
type that says:

"Product warranty will be void if top cover is removed, if the drive 
experiences shock in excess of 150 G's, or if any of the labels are 
removed."

150 G's??  Sounds like an airplane or something.....  Is a two foot drop 
to a linoleum floor more than 150 G's??  Whatever, the result is the 
result, so I'll just have to figure I bought "Don't drop hard drives!" 
warning signals in my brain with the death of one 500MB drive.  Other 
than that, I didn't really come up with anything useful... I trashed one 
500MB drive and mucked up the reassembly of Dell #2.  All in all, not a 
very successful night of computer surgery!