[Nottingham] Computer woes

[Graeme Fowler]

On Fri, 6 Jun 2003, Andy Davidson wrote:
> Hah, it must be the weather for it.. I'm in a Leeds Data Centre *right now* 
> looking at a dead 80GB Maxtor disk trying to fathom wtf to do about 
> replacing it RSN.  Which is the first Maxtor I've had die on me (had plenty 
> of Fujitsu ones in the last few months, and had Seagates and WDs die on me 
> in the past.).

Yep, it really must be the weather. In the last few weeks I've seen several 
vendors' IDE disks go parp, along with a small number of hideously expensive 
SCSI disks too.

Must look up when the warranties are due to expire on disks, they all seem to 
fail the following month...

As for data recovery, we can *sometimes* coax disks back into life here by 
keeping them very cool (I have been known in previous jobs to refrigerate them 
first) by running a very large desk fan over the top of them at high speed. 
That seems, in about 30% of cases (guesstimate) to give us enough life to 
persuade the data in a bus-wards direction without going POP! in the process.

All the usual disclaimers apply, not least that paying for professional data 
recovery comes a distant last in the queue of: use hardware RAID, use software 
RAID, keep regular backups.  :)

G