Of drive failures and fixes
Posted on June 23, 2004
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 31 views |
I still have a bunch of old Macs laying around of various pedigrees (if anyone wants a 7200 or a 7500 they’re yours for the price of shipping), one of which is a beige G3 with maxed-out RAM and a whopping 8 Gig hard-drive. It runs 10.1.2 just fine and had been up non-stop for months grinding away as my MP3 server.
That is until it up and died one particularly hot and humid day last week.
It wasn’t the usual die-and-hang sort of thing. No kernel panic, no flashing disk icon, and oddly enough no signal out to the monitor after the initial start-up bong. It died a silent death, nothing but black screen.
I checked cables, I reseated RAM, I tried booting from CDs (it seems my Panther install CDs cause a kernel panic on that particular machine - who knew?) but nothing. I poked, prodded, and tried a couple key combinations. Then I listened closely to the hard drive.
The drive in that machine has always been really noisy, it’s pretty obvious when it’s seeking, but now it was completely silent save for the odd semi-scratching/thunking noise on start-up. As you might guess anything that can be described as “scratchy” or “thunky” as it pertains to a hard-drive is a Bad Thing(tm). Come to think of it there are no good situations that can be described as “scratchy” or “thunky”.
“Well that’s interesting”, I thought as I unseated the drive from the machine. Then I put it back in. Then I took the drive out of the 7500 to try it but alas Apple changed the connectors in those intervening years so I tossed that drive into a corner. I put the original drive back in again. Then I put it back in on it’s side. But nothing. Just those same unpleasant sounds.
Then I remembered another dead drive I’d had way back in about 1996 (come to think of it, that was the last bad drive I’ve had - I think I’ve had damned good luck so far). Way back then my 20 Meg external SCSI drive up and died so I brought it in to the network/hardware guy at Mackerel, the company I worked for at the time, to see if he could get the data off.
As I remember it Ryan picked the drive up and looked at it. Then he turned it over, slammed it down against the edge of the desk and handed it back to me with a “try that” that only Ryan can muster. “Huh?!?” I asked. Ryan looked at me, shrugged, said “sticktion” and walked away.
Of course this story would suck if that trick hadn’t worked so you know it did and for all I know that SCSI drive, wherever it is, is probably still working to this day.
In that spirit I hauled the G3’s drive out once again, picked it up, whacked it against the desk, put it back in and…
It’s now running Postfix and Apache in a closet upstairs.
Sticktion. Go figgur.