Comment by vidarh

Ouch. I knew someone who claimed to have dealt with that or a similar effect after their cleaning person had pulled the plug on their servers by putting the drive in an oven while connected and heating it slowly.

Personally my most nailbiting period was when I got my first (20MB!) drive as a kid and it was too big an investment to replace even when it refused to spin up without me opening up the drive(!) and nudging the platter with my finger to help the motor spin it up... I backed everything up (on floppies), and stored everything important straight to floppies, but it was still more convenient to hold on to the HD for the next 6 months or so until I'd saved up enough to replace it...

It's remarkable what drives can survive if you're lucky... Also remarkable how quickly that luck can run out, though.

> "hey, it already doesn't work, what have you got to lose?"

This attitude has saved me more than once. Recognising when you can afford to do things that seems ridiculous helps surprisingly often.