On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 07:56 +0000, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
What, by the way, in "stiction", sticks? Is it the mechanism which traverses the heads over the disk surfaces? (That would explain the failure to find the "missing operating system". Or could it be that the disks themselves don't start to spin?
It's the disks themselves that won't spin
What happens is that when a drive is running the gap between the heads and the platter is maintained by air friction/aerodynamics...as the drive spins down the heads move to a landing zone (part of the disk that isn't written to) and when the drive is stationary the heads are actually in contact with the disk (sounds scary I know but it's better than them clanging against it every time the drive is moved)
Anyway sometimes for whatever reason the friction between the heads and the platter is too much for the (fairly weak) drive motor to overcome.
In terminal cases there are several unscientific methods to fix this..one being what I like to call the radial wave. Where you twist the drive in a jerky movement to attempt to free the platters inside.
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Not really worth it for personal data and mp3's etc but a few specialised companies offer data recovery services. In your case they would strip out the platters and attach them to a new head unit, recover the data and write it out to a new one for you. What they can recover even in some extreme failures is amazing. A company I worked for paid £5000 for data recovery once, they got everything back from a drive that had been electrically cooked. Very expensive but useful in certain circumstances. (we learned all about backups that day!) Its the same technology that *could* be used in a forensic case.
Stuart