Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Last week, a PC in my wife's medical office wouldn't boot, with the dreaded "no drive detected" error message. Figuring "what do we have to lose", I turned it off cracked the case, started whacking the C: drive with a screwdriver handle, and punched the power.

It booted.

The office manager who was watching me had to pick her jaw up off the floor. We proceeded to copy everything possibly important off it onto a USB drive, knowing that may well have been its last spin-up ever and it's next power off may be the final one.

View on HN

> whacking the C: drive with a screwdriver handle, and punched the power.

Disk heads have been "sticking" like that forever[1], I guess. And it's a good bit that it will stick back down soon and plow right into a set of cylinders.

And the internals of disks have gotten more finicky (helium filled), faster spinning aerodynamically lifted heads etc.

[1] - http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010326

whacking the side of a TV also was a common "solution" for TV's back in the CRT days.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/comments/2b3cpi/why_...

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7167193

Percussive Maintenance

(uncountable) (humorous) The use of physical concussion, such as a knock or a tap, in an attempt to make a malfunctioning device or person work.

Device or person? I've been tempted on the "or person" part, but never actually tried it...

"Beatings will continue until morale improves"

Pete Conrad famously had to smack around some surface experiments during Apollo 12.

Growing up, we had a CRT that my father had built from a kit. Occasionally, the image would tint green-ish. When this happened, my father would slide the cabinet 45 degrees out (so he could get behind it, and then turn a blow dryer on the back of it. Given a little bit of time (5 minutes? it was a long time ago) the picture would go back to normal.

Also, he helped me fix a problem with my car using a piece from the fish tank. I hope one day to be as amazing as my father was.

Could also have been a loose cable. Completely unplug (both ends) all the cables, and then plug them back in. I've had cables come loose over the years, especially back in the IDE days. It's easy to overlook, because the cables can look like they're properly seated.

I checked that, and used canned air to blow out the sockets before reconnecting everything. It was honestly just a case of internal stiction that needed to be freed before the drive could spin up.

I've had it happen to me a few times with SATA cables that don't have a clip (or the socket can't use it, like before SATA 300). IDE sticks in there so well that I think I'm going to damage something when pulling a cable out.

I had to do this with a Quantum drive in an old 90s Mac - my approach was to hold it horizontally and rotate the drive aggressively to try to unstick the platters. Worked well but we also copied stuff off of it asap after that.

OMG that reminded me! Someone sold me a cheap 50MB HD in the late 90s (it was probably full of dubiously obtained files or such). It would teeeechnically spin up, but my Amiga was pulling about 50KB per second off of it, and it made a grinding bearing sound. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I flipped it over and squirted a little 3-in-1 oil into the bearing.

RRRRNGNGNGGNGGGGGRRRRRRRRMMMMMMmmmmmmmmm.....

...as the grinding slowly morphed into the high pitched whine of a happy SCSI drive, and the drive transfer meter crept up to a reasonable 1MB per second. I got the files off of it with a quickness, then threw it away.

Yes, I have officially, in front of witnesses, sped up a computer by oiling it.

Back in early 90's, a friend had a 20Mb hard drive with stiction problems that wouldn't spin up. We wound up putting it on a radiator, and that warmed it up enough that it would spin up and be a working hard drive. Didn't store anything important on it after that, but it did stay running for a couple of months in that state.

While in college I worked tech support for a pc manufacturer. Western Digital had a 1G drive that regularly would just seize up due to some sort of issue.

The short term fix was exactly as you describe. Give the drive a few strong hits and it would resume spinning.

I remember my mother calling me with a machine that was making horrible noises and shutting down randomly. I told her to kick it. It took a few minutes for her to believe me. And she did. And the noises went away and it worked fine. I don't think I ever explained to her why I prescribed that remedy...

The old Apple IIe’s used suffered from an occasional manufacturing defect that would cause the chips to be slightly disconnected from the main board. The recommended fix was to pick it up a few inches off the desk and drop it to re-seat the chips.

Apple ][+ too. In addition those 72x chips would fail with time. We figured out that a can of compressed air was handy.

Power on. Wait for machine to freeze. Spray a chip with compressed air to cool it. Try again. If it stayed working it was probably that chip.

Thank goodness they were socketed.

That was the Apple III.

Haha yeah. We used to call that “percussive maintenance”.

Reminds me of the good old ST506. Lost quite a few files to the gummy lube on that drive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com