HELP with 7300 hard disk PLEASE

[John B. Milton]

In article <1311 at plx.UUCP> walt at plx.UUCP (Walt Novinger ) writes:
>My 7300's 40MB Seagate ST251 hard disk suddenly went south the other day,
>and I have to get the data off it, if possible.  I tried running the
>diagnostics disk to test the drive, and it fails on the "recal" test.

Are you absolutely sure it's spinning up? I have heard of drives where the
baking mechanism stickes to the spindle on shutdown and the next time you
power it up, it won't spin up. If it won't spin up, it won't try to move the
heads. One solution was dropthe fron of the machine about 6" to jar it loose.
I don't think I would recomend that. If it is spinning up, then the lack of
recal could be several problems.

Bad logic board on the drive. You should be able to get that board replaced and
still get the data. BE WARNED if you try to send a drive back for service, even
if you mark it to keep the drive part, they will most likely scrap it. The best
solution is to get another drive of the same type, a spline head tool and swap
the board yourself.

The other thing keeping it from recaling might be soft. The diagnostic disk
won't tell you the difference between 1. can't move the head to track 0,
2. can't get a track header on the lowest track, and 3. drive is missing the
drive magic number. It could be that a tiny glitch has dinged the VHB (Volume
Home Block). The bad news is that there isn't much in the way of low level
utilities on the UNIXpc to go patching around with. The interactive device
test is supposed to almost allow some of this, but it won't work for hard disks,
only floppies. My suggestion if you want to see what's REALLY on the disk right
now, is to put it on a PClone and get ahold of one of those super fantanstic
hard drive programs that are out now. One of those should be able to show you
more than you want to know and, at least tell you whether it's a hardware or
magware problem.

John
-- 
John Bly Milton IV, jbm at uncle.UUCP, n8emr!uncle!jbm at osu-cis.cis.ohio-state.edu
(614) h:294-4823, w:764-4272;  MS-DOS is a beautiful flower that smells bad!