[mythtv-users] Lost my OS hard drive (also ran)

[James Crow]

bhaskins at chartermi.net wrote:
> ---- David Brodbeck <gull at gull.us> wrote: 
>   
>> Ian Clark wrote:
>>     
>>> However, that was a trick to spin up a drive that wouldn't, clicking 
>>> sounds more permanent. :(
>>>       
>> Not to be a pessimist, but my experience is that clicking often means 
>> the servo track is damaged.  If the servo track is gone, even 
>> professional data recovery places are mostly helpless to get the data.
>>     
>
> I'm not trying to highjack this hread, but I would like to share something
> that just happened to me.
>
> One of my external hard drives recently failed and the reason  was that it
> was not spinning up. After many off on cycles it did finally spin up.
> I was more that just a little ticked because the unit was  quite new and
> had very few hours on it
> .
> I had spent many hours moving files off of the drive when it finally dawned
> on me that I was not getting any data errors.
> Further examination led to finding that the line input capacitor had lost 
> about 2/3 of it's rated value which had a drastic effect on the startup voltages.
> Oscilloscope traces of the +5 and +12 looked like something from a bad dream..
> So, just one more thing to check before tossing the hard drive.    
>
>   
I have had a brick for an external hard drive with failing caps. I was 
able to easily replace the caps and the PSU is back up and going. 
Unfortunately, in this instance, the hard drive was an internal type. I 
had just replaced a failing PSU due to bad caps so that may have 
contributed to the hard drives demise. Of well. I need to pay better 
attention to where I store my backups. They do no good if stored on the 
same physical drive as the source.

Thanks,
James