u600288@lanl.gov (Geoff Walsh) (07/04/90)
I think I have a hard disk problem, but I would like to find out if anyone else has had a similar problem before I turn my old hard disk into a door stop (backups??? hard disks NEVER go bad!). I've got a Mac IIx running system 6.0.3 with 8 MB RAM and a 80 MB Apple disk (made by Quantum, 3 1/2" form factor). Last night when I went home, everything was fine. I didn't turn off the machine (I never do since I use it every day). This morning when I came in, I double clicked on a document and nothing happened (listed by Name). Repeated with the same results. I double clicked on a document in another folder (listed by Icon). The icon disappeared, but the file name remained. I went to restart. Most of the finder menus were either truncated or empty (the File and Edit menus were empty). Restart and Shutdown were still there under the Special menu, so I went for the restart. After the normal short while, I got a diskette icon with a 0 on the shutter and a blinking ? in the middle of the diskette. Finally, I booted up with a system diskette, but couldn't mount the hard disk, or even see it. Next I tried the Apple utilities. Apple HD SC Setup couldn't find the disk to run the test routines, and Disk First Aid only recognized the internal diskette drive, not the hard disk. Next, I tried SUM II, and it also didn't find the hard disk. We tried various manufacturers' hard disk setup/diagnostic routines we have here. CMS recognized that there was a disk at SCSI address 0, but kept getting SCSI errors when accessing it. It did correctly identify the amount of free space on the disk however. None of the other utilities even recognized the disk. The CMS utility was unable to initialize the disk though. We put the disk in another machine with similar results, so I don't think the problem is the disk controller (the other machine's hard disk worked OK). A few other observations/notes: When booting up, the little green access light on the disk blinks. This can be seen only with the cover off. The blinks seem to correspond to the blinking ?'s in the diskette icon at boot time. The machine isn't that old - it was bought new last November. I haven't had any problems at all with it up until now. There shouldn't have been any viruses on the disk. I routinely ran Disinfectant whenever I got any new software. The latest I had was Disinfectant 1.8. Someone said if I had the Steroid virus, it would have gone off on July 1. The machine was started fine on July 2 and restarted at least once again. The problem occurred the morning of July 3. There weren't any messages anywhere indicating I had been attacked. The machine has a surge protector on it. Other machines left running in the same room didn't have any problems, so I don't think it was a power line problem. If anyone has had anything similar happen to them please let me know what you did, and whether or not you were able to recover. I've never had a disk drive go bad so unexpectedly. Does anyone out there know how or why this happened? In case the disk is trashed, does anyone know of any software tools I can use to access the disk and at least pull off tracks and piece together files again by hand? There are a few files I really need. Any help will be most gratefully appreciated. Please email answers, since I don't usually spend a lot of time reading the news groups in detail. Thanks for any and all help Geoff Walsh R & D Associates (213) 645-1122 ext 363 u600288@lanl.beta.gov