hard drive update

[waider]

Well, the drive spent the night in the freezer. After a bit of goofing around with various boot disks, I managed to get it up and running long enough to save my home directory, at which point it clunked again. Then I got it actually booted, but it clunked while I was trying to dump the main partition. Finally I got it booted into Win2K, but it clunked shortly after I logged in. I've put it back in the freezer again and I'm going to give it one more go - I really want to try and save the Win2K partition, since I've got some good game saves there - and then it's back to the suppliers to see if their warranty works.

Comments

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

What if the warranty says "No user freezable parts within"?

[wisn.livejournal.com]

How strange. I've heard of (and used) the slam-the-drive-hard-on-concrete trick, but never the freeze technique.

I'm wondering if waving your drives in the air like you just don't care would help.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Sure, but you gots ta mean it.

I am highly amused to note that on booting Win2K (yes, the drive is somewhat zombie-like and refuses to properly die) I got a DOS Window informing me that it's basically running chkdsk.

Oh please let me have enough time to save my Midtown Madness game files...

[waider.livejournal.com]

What, me, worry?

[candice.livejournal.com]

The freeze technique is heavily oldschool; it used to be common for drives of the fucking huge and heavy variety. These days it's purpose is mostly to scare the local demons into working.

[waider.livejournal.com]

appears to be the case. The drive is now working as-is with no care on my part other than "don't stress it". That means no compiles, and more importantly it means I can't raw-dump the disk because, well, that stresses the disk. Ah well. It's going to the repair shop shortly.