hellerst@husc4.HARVARD.EDU (Joe Hellerstein) (01/15/89)
Help me, please! My LaCie Cirrus 30 drive has been squeaking recently, so I called up LaCie yesterday, and their tech people told me how to fix the problem. So I opened up the case, and did what they said -- pulled some little copper sleeve a few millimeters further from the drive than it was (I think the sleeve was called a "drum shoe," or something. ??) This helped the squeak for about five minutes, and then it came back. So I left the case unscrewed, and every couple of minutes it would start to squeak again, and I'd tweak this little sleeve for it to stop. Well, the last time I did this (and sometimes I did this with the power on, since the guy at LaCie suggested originally that I do that to stop the fan and make sure the fan wasn't squeaking) I was running the new version of Virus Rx, and I saw that the dial in the drive that moves back and forth had started oscillating: first very slowly in one direction, then quickly back to the other direction. Virus Rx appeared to be making no progress, and the drive wasn't making tell-tale scanning noises. I hit the programmer's switch, got into MacsBug and did an "es" to quit Virus Rx, and that just put me back where I was before in Virus Rx, with the oscillating dial. I shut it all down, and when I turned the Mac and the drive back on from the power strip, the drive chattered for a second, and then I got a sad Mac. Now, if I boot up the Mac with the drive on, I get the sad Mac, and if I leave the drive off until after it all boots, I get nothing. Most of my SCSI programs (a friend's copy of SUM, the SCSI bus cdev, and SilverLining, the LaCie drive software) recognize that there's a device at slot 1 (where it was) but can't do anything with it. SCSI bus crashes the mac when I try to mount. Also, I noticed that something was rattling around the case of the drive, and it turned out to be a tiny clear plastic tab, about 2mm square and 1/2 mm thick. I've saved it for whatever it's worth. I take it that it's some kind of hardware failure, probably due to my poking around inside. By the way, the Sad Mac errors vary slightly in the the last digit. I've seen the following: 0F0003, 0F000A and I think I remember a 0F0004. Those are zeros, not "oh"s, and I've got a fairly new Mac Plus. Two questions: is there anything I can do myself? and Will LaCie honor my warranty? Before I did anything I asked the guy from LaCie whether my twiddling of this sleeve thing would void the warranty, and he said no. Clearly I'm legally not in great shape, but I doubt I'd bother sueing anyone anyhow -- the question is whether anyone has had experience with how nice LaCie is to people like me, whether they pride themselves on good customer support. They've been awful nice up to now. Any tips or help will be GREATLY appreciated. Any guesses as to what exactly went wrong, even if I can't fix it? It's now Saturday night, and I intend to call LaCie first thing Monday morning. If anyone's curious about how this all turns out, I can let you know. After all the times I've recommended them, I hope they don't let me down. Thanks in advance for whatever... Joe Hellerstein :-(