barry@primerd.prime.com (09/27/89)
This is the 3rd installment in my tale of hard disk woes ...
In late August, the 3.5" Seagate ST157N 40MB hard drive in my MAC II
developed the classic "stiction" problem and refused to spin up. I got
the drive to work by manually turning the "flywheel" (reported in a
posting) and kept the system running. On 9/20, Apple replaced the
Seagate with a noisier 5.25" Quantum Q250. When I queried if I should
keep the Quantum or ask for another Seagate, nearly all of the replies I
received said that the Quantum was the better drive.
Well, Quantum may be the better drive, but the one I got was definitely
a lemon, because it failed yesterday afternoon! The system had been up
continuously since Computerland installed the Quantum. I shut down
yesterday AM so I could install a SCSI extension cable to my removable
cartridge drive and restarted w/o any problems. About 1:30, the Mac
froze in mid-operation. When I restarted, I discovered that the Quantum
disk would not start up! That disk failed after one power down/up
sequence; talk about infant mortality!
When Computerland installed the Quantum, I convinced them to let me keep
the Seagate "for a while" until I was satisfied the Quantum was working
properly (can you say "premonition"?). After fiddling unsuccessfully
with the Quantum, I reinstalled the Seagate and found that it, too,
wouldn't spin up. Since the "flywheel" of the Seagate is visible
underneath the PCB mounted on top of the drive, I removed the metal
strip from the edge of a 12" ruler and used this flexible piece of metal
to nudge the flywheel *gentley" into a new position. The last time I
had this problem I removed the PCB - the metal strip method is *much*
faster.
Since I had purchased a PLI Turbo 40 removable cartride drive (based on
Syquest mechanism) on 9/17, I was able to restore my files from Friday's
DiskFit backup on the PLI and get back on the air very quickly with the
only loss being the file I had created Monday AM. The first backup to
the PLI Turbo 40 takes about 10 minutes - DiskFit generates an exact
image of all folders and files. Subsequent backups take only about a
minute or two because DiskFit deletes any files/folders that were
deleted from the drive being backed up and copies any files or folders
that were just created or are newer than their counterparts. Similarly,
restoring from the Turbo 40 to the Seagate only took about a minute
because most of the files on the Seagate were still valid. A
Syquest-based drive is definitely the way to go when backing up a 40MB
hard drive!
Apple still owes me a new drive. I wonder what they'll offer this
time.
Barry
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Barry Wolman | barry@s66.prime.com
Principal Technical Consultant | 492 Old Connecticut Path
Prime Computer | Framingham, MA 01701
| 508/626-1700, ext. 4187
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Nothing in this posting reflects an official position of Prime Computer.