It's sometimes possible to restart a drive that won't spin up by
removing the drive and holding it horizontally with the cables attached.
Start the computer and give the drive a very sharp rotational twist
around the drive axis. If you get it to boot, immediately back up. It's
better to let the 'puter run constantly, rather than shutting it down.
Drives rarely fail while running, unless they are very old. No spinup on
start is a much more common failure mode.
JR

PlainBill wrote:

Well, I really blew it this time. About a month ago I replaced my 120
gig hard drive with a new 200 Gig Maxtor, model # 6B200P. In
violation of my common sense, I did NOT keep the old drive as a
backup. Well, the new drive went belly up last week - it wouldn't
even spin up. Some of the stuff on the drive is easily replaceable,
but many of the pictures of my Granddaughter cannot be replaced.

I requested an advance replacement from Maxtor, and when it arrived I
tried to repair the bad drive by swapping the electronics boards. I
verified these had identical part numbers. This had a limited sucess:
The new hda does not spin up with the old electronics board; the old
hda DOES spin up with the new board. However, the drive does not
properly report it's size. The new drive reports it is 203.9 Gig; the
new electronics board with the old hda reports it's size as 250 Gig,
then generates POST errors.

At this point I can restore the electronics boards to the proper hdas
and return the old drive to satisfy the terms of the advance
replacement, since I have not altered anything. The last option I am
considering is a part which appears to be a SST Serial flash chip. It
should be possible to swap these between boards if I unsolder with
chip-quik, but I'm not looking forward to it.

Does anyone have any experience with these drives, or any advice to
give?

PlainBill


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