Date   : Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:29:09 -0500
From   : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Technomatic Disaster

Ian Wolstenholme wrote:
> Has anyone got any ideas?

Can you rule out the Adaptec bridge for sure (i.e. do you have a known-good 
spare)? I have seen them fail before, although not often.

After that (in order of preference):

1) See if you can rustle up a manual for the drive itself. Some of them give 
you a way of accessing diagnostic codes which might give more info about the 
exact fault (and e.g. it might be possible to fix a speed-related problem)

2) Forced heating or cooling of the drive *might* bring it back long enough to 
get data out of it. (if successful best method there would then be to clone 
the contents to a working disk, as that's a lot faster than trying to do a 
serial archive)

3) Pulling the cover on it might reveal some problems (i.e. I had one drive 
where the coating on the magnets for the voice coil was flaking off and giving 
all sorts of errors - surprisingly, cleaning all the crud out got over 80% of 
the data back, which was 80% better than having a metal brick :-)

cheers

Jules