yet another UNIXpc HD tale

[Bill Carpenter]

Okay, okay.  I should have paid closer attention to all those billions
of "help me with my hard drive" messages, but I knew it would never
happen to me.  No, wait, that's not right.  In fact, it has happened
to me and those nearby often enough that we think it's routine, but
we're so woefully hardware-ignorant that we just choose between
sending them home under warranty or tossing them out and buying new
ones.  (No, we don't really toss them out.  We use them for curling
practice.)

This time, though, I've got a broken hard drive on my UNIXpc that is
so tantalizingly close to "ok" that I can hardly stand it.  Although
the drive is under warranty (no sweat), I'd sure like to be able to
get my data off it before it goes cross-country.  (What do you mean
"backups"?  What kind of wimp do you think I am? :-)

THE EQUIPMENT:

  Seagate ST-251
  UNIXpc has original WD 1010 controller chip

THE SYMPTOMS:

Failed to boot after a normal powerdown (the famous dancing little
boxes).  I can boot from the floppy with no trouble.  I can also boot
the machine from another swapped-in hard drive.

>From the diagnostics disk, I always get "can't recal, response = 40"
no matter what I try.  Other disk tests like random seek,
nondestructive surface test, etc, all go okay (except that at the
beginning they seem to do a recal and report an error for that, then
after I hit return, they do the rest of the test with no complaint).

If I do a boot from "floppy boot" and do the trick to get a shell
prompt, I have no trouble mounting and unmounting the hard drive on
/mnt.  In fact, when it is mounted, I can read and write whatever I
please from it.  Yes, friends, I have the full power of UNIX at my
disposal :-).

THE BEST THING YOU COULD TELL ME:

Something like "Yeah, we see that all the time on the 251's.  All you
have to do is [your solution here] and it will spin like a champ for a
couple more months."

THE NEXT BEST THING YOU COULD TELL ME:

How to get my data off the disk after I've done a floppy boot.  As far
as I can figure out, I can't use the floppy for anything else after
I've booted off it ("filesystem busy").  If there is a way, I'd sure
like to hear about it.

I also have another UNIXpc within a few feet of the broken one, so if
there is a way to solve this puzzle using that, it's there.  I
couldn't do anything with the serial ports, could I (yes, I know how
long it would take).

As you can probably guess, neither of these machines has a tape drive
nor a second hard drive upgrade.  (The latter looks pretty attractive,
but this is probably not an ideal time to try building it.)

THINGS I'VE ALREADY TRIED THAT MADE NOT MUCH DIFFERENCE:

1.  Tightening the screws that hold the hard drive together.
2.  Power cycling a bunch of times.
3.  Running the "ldrcopy" program from the floppy boot disk.
4.  Connecting and disconnecting power and data cables to make sure
    they're okay.
5.  Reseating a bunch of the big chips on the motherboard.
6.  Waiting a while.
7.  Looking at things really, really hard.

YOUR ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS:

Will be speedily answered, and you advice will be gratefully received.
--
   Bill Carpenter         att!hos1cad!wjc  or  attmail!bill