Comment by acidburnNSA
4 years ago
I 'worked' for my own high school's IT dept, a few hours a week, as a student. It was an amazing experience working with those guys. I learned so many things, from how to punch, terminate, and run cables to how to set up a Ghost image and deploy it en masse across the district.
One day one of the old macs was showing the frowny face in a in-session classroom. Boss sent me down there with specific instructions: "pull out the hard drive and beat it really hard with the handle of this screwdriver". I was like: "?" and he was like, "just do it".
So I go down there and let myself in, trying not to interrupt the class. I climb behind the computer on a cart and pull out the HD. I beat it with the handle, like a good 10 times. Of course this got the class all riled up. I blushed, but told them this was normal operating procedure. Plug it back in and it works. I was (secretly) as amazed as everyone else in the class.
Back in the IT office, I say it worked. IT boss smiles and nods. I ask how. Well as it turns out some of those old hard drives used a vegetable oil based lube that seizes up if it's not used for a while. So if you bash it it un-seizes and starts turning again.
Anyway great times, fun memories. We all got our CompTIA A+ certifications at the end, but don't ask me what IRQ number is for the parallel port these days.
> ...pull out the HD. I beat it with the handle, like a good 10 times...
Heh. Nice.
A coworker's Mac wouldn't boot. I couldn't hear the hard drive. It was a model with the tip of the spindle exposed. I found a pencil with a gummy eraser. Gave the spindle a twist as I turned the power on.
Told the amazed user, "Do not turn off your computer until after you have backed up your data. That probably won't work twice."
Good times.
Had a similar experience with the external HDD of a friend of a friend.
HDD wouldn't be recognized, sticking my ear to it i could only hear the motor emit a beep-like sound, no spin up.
Her masters thesis on it, inaccessible, i've opened up the case, removed the HDD, unscrewed the top and there was the drive arm, stuck in the mid of the platters...
Took a Torx screwdriver, turned the platters backwards and unstuck the drive arm...
Copied all data off of it and sent here to the nearest computer hardware store to get another drive...
Master thesis was successfully recovered!
Just for the sake of clarification, where was the Torx screw located? The spindle axis or the drive arm axis? (Or somewhere else?) And how did you unstick the drive arm without allowing the head to contact platters? Just trying to visualize, and failing badly.
Also, awesome ;)
2 replies →
It probably would. Static friction is a lot harder to overcome than dynamic friction in terms of torque.
And now ... a group of 30 - no-longer - students treat their IT equipment with hits by a screw driver ... because it works.
Our education system is amazing ;)
Cargo culting in a nutshell.
>> un-seizes and starts turning again.
More likely an armature rather than a platter. Violence also worked when the drive would get stuck on a bad sector. Bashing the drive horizontally, while it was on, would sometimes move the arm enough for the drive to reacquire and hopefully not hit the same error on the next read attempt.
I believe the term for this is ‘percussive maintenance’
A few years ago a friend ran a camera shop. From time to time someone would come in with an SLR that wouldn't behave (long exposure, no exposure, nothing in viewfinder). He'd take it, tell them to go away and come back in an hour, then hit it on a telephone directory. 9 times out of 10 that would free the stuck/sticking mirror and everything would be fine. He had to tell the customer to go away, though, so they didn't get agitated seeing him bash their expensive SLR around
I suspect people hand their parcels to the post office with the same care, blissfully unaware of what their parcel is about to go through.
In the Navy, we called it “mechanical agitation” it raised fewer eyebrows than “I hit it with a wrench and it started working again.”
American components, Russian components, all made in Taiwan!
I haven't needed to use it since....
last Tuesday
The difference between a professional mechanic and an amateur is that the professional know where to hit something with the handle of a screwdriver
I did similar violence to my old HDD-based iPod. One day it just made a chugga chugga noise. Meaning the HDD was dead. In researching how to recover some music a forum member mentioned dropping it really hard. So I slammed it into my desk and terrified the office. And it continued working for the next few years.
"stiction". Well known in the Apple community in the ... late 80's/early 90's, IIRC? I want to say I remember some official Apple documentation saying to drop the machine from a few inches up in the air, but I may be misremembering.
This was supposedly true of the Apple III (https://www.techjunkie.com/apple-iii-drop/), but upon searching to find that link, it seems this story may be apocryphal: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12283/did...
Was this a Seagate drive?