[Coco] OT: drive recovery

[Arthur Flexser]

Marty comments...
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2007 17:29:02 -0700
From: martygoodman <martygoodman at sbcglobal.net>
To: Arthur Flexser <flexser at fiu.edu>
Subject: Re: ever hear of this drive recovery trick?

It IS odd that no explanation of MECHANISM as to why freezing should do 
anything good for a stuck drive is provided by the author of this tale, or 
by the references he alludes to (or perhaps the writer of the tale fails to 
tell us what his references say on the subject, tho).

I cannot for the life of me figure how freezing can have any good effect Or 
why, if it does, it would make data harder to recover later by other means. 
I don't buy the stuff about "condensation":  The drive is supposed to be 
VERY hermetically sealed.

If the drive failes due to a bad controller board, that's something an end 
user who has some abilty to tinker should be easily able to fix:  Get that 
EXACT SAME make and model and size and vintage drive, and swap out the 
controller board.  I've done this on occasion, and on the models I've tried 
it with it turned out to be rather quick and easy (tho one must have a good 
set of tools, including often a good set of torx and/or hex drivers, and 
perhaps of the security sort... all of which I have in stock here.

But if the problem is a bad motor, that's 'way beyond the scope of even a 
relatively accomplished tinkerer, for as I understand it "clean rooms" are 
required when you upen up a drive to the platters, and they may NOT make it 
easy to pop a platter out and put it in another opened drive.  Never had 
occasion to try that.

---marty

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Arthur Flexser" <flexser at fiu.edu>
To: "Marty Goodman" <martygoodman at sbcglobal.net>
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2007 4:18 PM
Subject: ever hear of this drive recovery trick?


> And, any idea why it should work, if it works?
>
> Art