Date   : Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:08:03 -0500
From   : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: happy bunny

Rob wrote:
> Eek some horror stories there.  Best I can manage is a full-height
> ST506 type drive that would only read data if positioned upside down.

Yeah, I've had that before. Plus with at least some st506/412 drives you were 
supposed to re-do the low-level format if you changed their orientation (I 
think later ones were better in that regard)

> Even then I had trouble with a handful of sectors - after getting a
> few read by tapping the drive just as it tried to read it, the last
> few read ok if it were dropped onto the desk from a couple of inches,
> as it tried ...  needless to say, it was junked after we finished ..

:-) They can benefit from treatment like that, plus artificial heating or 
cooling can help. Sometimes duff sectors would cough up their data after a lot 
of read attempts, and sometimes seeking away from a bad sector and then back 
to it would magically work. Once upon a time I had a script I'd cooked up to 
do that, but I'm not sure where it's at right now...

cheers

Jules