Jo22 wrote on 2024-02-16, 05:04:
Speaking of gorillas, I knew a person who used a rubber mallet on the hard disk on his PC, to make it spin-up (no kidding).
The real culprit was the power supply, though, I think.
It didn't have enough power to handle the power surge needed by the HDD to spin-up.
Guilty as charged!
Tho in a more controlled manner.
I used to manage (we were a small team) about 500 or so PC's in a large factory, mostly Compaq's but a few other bands and even a handful of Mac's.
This is when the bleeding edge were Pentium Pros, and most of the fleet were still using 486's.
Anyways the Compaq's came with really unreliable HDD's (Quantums? my memory fails me).
And trying to recover data from broken HDD's became an unofficial part of my job.
The amount of unsaved documents ppl had been working on "for weeks" still astounds me, despite us having courses on how to secure data etc.
So being able to recover data from a crashed system would be a very nice bonus.
This is where the mallets come into play =)
First step in coaxing a drive that wont spin up was usually to twist it fast in your hands when powering on.
Second step was the mallet, tap on the side trying to shock the spindle to start rotating.
After that it was the freezer for 10 mins or so, then repeat step 1 and 2.
If it still wouldn't come alive it was time to start swapping parts.
PCB first, swapped from an identical but working drive.
Still no go? well its time to get intrusive.
We actually had access to a positive pressure cabinet (used for testing our products in the lab).
So off with the lid.
Rotate the platters to free them, apply power and help the arms start moving, etc.
Success rate was probably >50%, probably because almost all theese HDD's failed in a similar way.
Funny enough the higher up in the corporate ladder the less likely ppl were to follow simple procedures to save their data.
We never had any problems with the secretary's 🤣.
Managed to restore our CEO's drive, which included a very detailed CV he really wanted back.
He was looking for another job and no one else knew at that time (I kept the secret).
2 months later i get headhunted to the CEO's new company with 2x the pay =)
In the new job I didn't have to use a rubber mallet =)