[vox-tech] hard drive recovery

[Chris McKenzie]

The "click click" sound is caused by hard drives that loop in their
hardware boot-up process.  Whenever a drive starts up it does a series of
checks to see if the geometry is correct and various things like that that
you may assume is obvious.  The "click click" means that the system was
shut off immediately (power chord pulled) during an essential stage of
hardware bootup.  When the drive is powered again, it gets confused and
can't reset itself to the original state and start over again.  This is
notorious of the WDC caviars but is also common on the IBM DeskStar's if
they are not properly ventilated.  There are two ways to solve this and
they both require "Torx" screwdrivers which you can get from Home Depot:

Solution 1:
	Assumed: The drive is physically fine, that is to say that all the
connections and components are in order.
	Procedure:
		All drives have a memory chip where they remember things
like states.  If you can find this chip and the documentation, then with a
about +5.0v on the right pins you can reset the drive -- however this is
dependent on the drive.  Obscure and old models may actually have a small
battery.  If this is the case, just take out for an hour and then put back
in.

Solution 2:
	Assumed: The drive is not physically fine and may have a weak
connection or a missing component.
	Procedure:
		Purchase a drive identical to the drive in question.  Make
sure the new drive of the same model is working properly.  After
confirming this, replace the greenary (that is the logic board) of the
good drive with the drive in question.  This should fix your problem.  If
not, I don't know.


Sincerely,
	Christopher J. McKenzie

	cjm@ucdavis.edu
	mckenzie@cs.ucdavis.edu
	H: (818) 991-7724
	C: (818) 429-3772
	1815 Mesa Ridge Ave
	Westlake Village, CA 91362