On Fri, 28 May 2010 14:47:25 -0700, mike wrote:

Hi,

Hoping to benefit from the collective wisdom of the group with regard to
computer systems. So far over a period of about 2 years I've brought
home from the scrapyard three different E-machine computers, all of
which had a blown-up power supply made by Bestec - I get the feeling
that that is reason enough to turn around and run the other way, once
you see the 'Bestec' name, since out of those three systems, the only
thing that was still usable that I have found was one 128Mb stick of
ram. Until the other day...

I was sorting out what I could drop off at the recyclers, scrapyard and
landfill, when I once again hooked up a Western Digital 40 Gb hard
drive, and once again got a bunch of grief from it, until I put a WD
utilities disk in the floppy drive, just to run the mfg's utilities on
it before tossing it. I selected for the program "install EZbios" -
just because I hadn't done that before, ya know? Next, I told it to
restore track 0 (zero), which it seemed happy enough to do. Long story
short, this drive which I couldn't even complete any kind of diagnostic
test on previously, I was now able to load Ubuntu on, and I used it for
3 days in a row for my usual news-gathering activities. Then, this
morning in the middle of my readings the system went brain- dead on me.

Of course, the first thing I suspect is the HD. I shut the system down
and let it sit for 15 or 20 minutes, then checked to make sure there's
no lose connectors or the like, nothing is unusually warm, and then
unplug and replug everything (possibly the stick of ram wasn't quite
seated right, everything else seemed OK) and started it back up - booted
into Ubuntu 8.04 fine, I let it idle awhile then shut it down for the
day. I can hardly wait to see what tomorrow may bring 8^).

Just wondering if any one had any info or thoughts on why the HD was
seemingly revived by the 'install EZbios' and 'restore track zero' moves
that I put on it, and also what I might do to make a more effective
repair to this drive, or at least a diagnostic that will tell me if
something's wrong with it - I really think it would benefit from a
low-level format but I don't have a program for that at the moment. The
Western Digital diagnostics pronounce it to be error- free.

Thanks,
Mike

The problems and solutions may be coincidental. There isn't much you can
do to make the repair more reliable nor are there consumer grade
diagnostics that can pinpoint problems.
I revived a 120 gig Maxtor a week ago by swapping the electronics with
an exact twin I had in the scrap box. The drive just quit. Made no noise,
platters didn't spin. Replaced the electronics board, problem solved
and friend didn't lose his OS or data.