www.deadharddrive.com

[larry]

We like to think that when one buys a new hard drive, the manufacturer would share potential problems. Ohhh! I'm not talking about voltage surges or backing up our data, we all know we should and could do those things. Matter of fact, most of us enjoy doing just that. I for one rather back up and fine tune my machine, rather than shoveling the walk or mowing the lawn. ""grin!"" "VERY IMPORTANT!"

Just over a year ago, I thought I got the best deal ever when I purchased new MAXTOR Diamond Max Plus 9 ...200 gigabyte,7200 RPM, ATA/133 HDD. Took it home for under $100. What a thrill!!

Formatted that puppy with NTFS and used it as a secondary storage and back-up drive. I've always been happy with MAXTOR drives.In the past I've had MAXTOR drives fail. And they had a three year replacement guarantee.I positively eulogized Maxtor all over the place.

I had one concern when I purchased the new 200 gig spinner.The MAXTOR box spoke to me and said, "One year replacement warrantee buddy!". "Whoahhhhh! Whats this all about?" "Oh well press on regardless"

"Ha Ha Ha" several weeks ago on a pleaseant Saturday afternoon I had the machine up on the LAN downloading updates. And doing important system drive cleanups and back-ups. When my boss (wife) says"Hey!! we're supposed to go to dinner at "Dead Lobster" we should have left over an hour ago!" "What are you doing down there?" You see we had a nice gift certificate from Christmas, who can afford to eat there with-out one?

So ...off I went,left the LAN up, left the machine up, and left the internet connection up. Came back 3 hours later and the machine is laying on it's side moaning. Stuck on boot-up with sick clicks coming after each moan.

Turned her off and started un-plugging stuff (internal peripherals) one thing at a time, then turn her back on until she'd boot. You know how they are, this is why we call all our machines she and her. They can tell you nothing is absolutely wrong with them, so you have keep guessing until they stop communicating with one syllable words.

Yeah! The 200 gig spinner went down. My main back-up drive!! So I located this wonder forum web-site and read every single message on every single forum. Great stuff! Tried everything! But couldn't leave a message here because once again (this forum machine), SHE wouldn't let me in,said she hadn't eaten in days and would not co-operate "grin"

I read all about hard drives in BIGELOWS manual. Wow, it turns out,when hard drive manufacturers jumped their drives to spin at 7200 rpm,they had to use light weight ceramic platters with a magnetic medium deposit. Rather than light weight metal with a magnetic deposit.

The manufacturers also switched to main motor fluid bearings (quieter),rather than ball bearing motors.On start-up this causes some vertical vibration on the platters. I believe (my theory) these vibrations oscillate out towards the outer edges of the platters where their amplitude is somewhat greater, thus aging the service track head (outer edge of platter) till it doesn't function properly any longer.

I understand that there is a software program to rewrite the service track. Anyone know anything about that?

I also learned that hard drive manufacturers pretty much use the new fluid bearings for making large capacity cheap drives.

As of this writing I froze the 200 gig spinner and got it to tell the bios it's alias instead of its' model number. Unfortunately "CALYPSO" is not a healthy response in the bios. I also believe this tells us that the service track is blown.

All in all, can anyone fix this spinner at a much more reasonable rate than hundreds of dollars? There seem to be more hard drive recovery shops than fast food and convienience stores combined. But I can't seem to find much competition for reasonable pricing. And I'm not losing any valuable business info, just lots of photos,updates ,driver files and back-up files. Plus other memory stuff we like to keep.

Indiana Lar

BTW I have two new Hard drive logic cards on hand if any-one wants or needs them, firmware is M8FYB.
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