"James Sweet" wrote in message news:jB2Cb.86499$_M.454302@attbi_s54...
"Stellijer" wrote in message
...

JW wrote in message
...
On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 07:34:46 -0500 "Stellijer"
wrote in Message id:
:

I peeled back the little seal on the drive in a pretty safe environment
(plus
I
didn't open the whole thing).

It appears the platters spin reasonably freely. The problem is that
the
motor
"jerks" the platters only a small amount at a time.

I'm very concerned that maybe the motor has burned out, in which case
I'm not
sure WHAT to do.

Much more likely would be the motor controller on the PCB.


That would probably be the best news since I could probably fix it by
swapping
out the PCB; an easy fix.

Could that cause the motor to make a "skreee" sound ever 30-60 seconds or
so,
too?

One thing to try- measure between each of the motor pins and ground,
one could have shorted to the case (GND) or open, in the former case
isolating it from ground might get it going.

Other possibilities- bad controller chip, bad bearings (too much
friction to let the motor start up, the skreee noise is the normal
ramping up of the drive waveform to get the drive up to normal RPM).

If it is a bad bearing, sometimes spot heating works.


It's surely not a head sound since the drive wasn't spinning yet.
It's
like the motor's gone crazy.


That sounds like the bearings were failing, which probably overheated the
motor driver and burned out one channel. You could probably just replace the
motor driver IC, or swap boards.