On Thursday 18 July 2002 22:54, you wrote:
> The Seagate ST-251 drive was the first one notorious for "stiction" which
> was
> failure to spin-up on system powerup. Sometimes just whacking the system
> case would start it, sometimes not. This was, I believe, a 40 MB MFM drive.
> Mine was in the AT I mentioned above. I eventually had to mount the drive
> where I could reach in through the front opening, to jiggle it when it
> wouldn't start.
>
> When I bought it, I was supposed to get a 30 MB drive. The 40 had just come
> out, They said, you'll never fill THIS one !!
>
>
> Finally got a 386 in about 1992 with a 420 MB drive and the AT went in the
> dumpster.
> By then the drive had died.
Maybe, maybe not. The 251-1 used a stepper motor that would accumulate carbon
on the rotor because it stopped in the same place everytime. The fix was
(nerves of steel, here!) to move the stepper motor about 30 deg in each
direction. You would feel the carbon build-up snapping off. Then, if the wind
was just right and the sun didn't get in your eyes, you would put the stepper
motor back where you got it from and all would be well ... until the next
time.
Been there, done that. The first time it happened I got a new religion called
"backup" which required spending endless hours sequestered with large stacks
of diskettes. Soon thereafter I had a full backup fail on the 3rd of about
140 diskettes.
I think that event marks the moment when I stopped believing that the sun
rose and set in Redmond, Washington. I had spent almost 3 months putting
together a database for a customer. When the drive died, I already had
buy-off on everything but the splash screen. I had three days to final
delivery and maybe 15 minutes work left on it. I had a verified (by
Microsoft) good backup that was only a few hours old.
And then I had nothing but a deadline and an already-spent deposit.
-- 9:56pm up 3 days, 21:19, 2 users, load average: 0.07, 0.04, 0.00"I'm thinking of going back to Windows; in Linux, none of the viruses seem to work."
http://organic-earth.com Organic urban gardening. With photos.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 14:07:12 EDT