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Comment by randombits0 | Hacker News Reader

I did this many years ago when I was a bench tech at a PC shop. It was an old Connor 40 meg drive running DOS. If I squeezed it just right, it would work. Too much? Failure, Abort/retry/ignore. Not enough? Same. So I stood there, squeezing the drive, and hitting ‘r’ for retry, over and over. It worked!

Boss walked by. “What the heck are you doing?”

“I’m milking the data out of this drive!”

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I had this happen once but the force that would cause the drive to work seemed to be gyroscopic rather that pressure on the casing. So I had to hold the laptop at an angle and turn myself around on the spot while I copied the data off. If I stopped spinning around the drive would grind/crash and the OS would hang.

Using a centrifuge to separate valuable data from low value redundant components is inspired!

The ones sink because they’re heavier.

You didn’t get sick ?

I only had to do it for several minutes, long enough to have it boot up successfully and copy off the most important data over wifi. I do remember getting a bit dizzy during the procedure. The laptop was a pretty light PowerBook G4 from 2003.

My theory (based on the sound the drive had been making, which prompted me to try imposing different kinds of sideways acceleration on the laptop until I could hear the drive spinning ”freely”) is that it wasn’t a problem with the disks/heads but a messed up bearing in the spindle motor.

> old Connor 40 meg drive

I would like to call out to the younger readers that this is not a typo. Think about how minuscule the capacity of this hard drive is, and also that it's entirely possible it was a full height 5.25" drive, which is 3.25" tall!

Here is a fun tour of old drive technology that goes into just how amazingly simple some of it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LbFKV_pPAE

Yep, I had a Seagate 40MB IDE hard drive, which I considered quite compact at 3.5” full height. It replaced 20MB full-height 5.25” MFM drives.

The MFM drives were… fun… in that if you connected one of the two data cables upside down, you’d crash the armature and destroy the hard drive.

I worked on this drive. It's a 3.5 drive. A long time ago. Time for my daily nap and Centrum shot.

Wait in line, and give me back those 8" floppies that you borrowed.

Seriously though: the amount of miniaturization in storage is something I'll never get used to. From punch cards and papertape via cassette to floppies, harddrives (in various incarnations and densities) and now to solid state so compact that you could store all of the data that I've created in my whole life in something about the size of your smallest fingernail. Incredible.

>> old Connor 40 meg drive >I would like to call out to the younger readers that this is not a typo.

Actually there is a typo there, it's Conner. But yeah, 40MB was even a luxurious capacity, my first HDD was 20 (later reformatted to 30 with an RLL controller)

Cheater! I used pirated ROMs to make my USR HST a dual standard.

I ran a BBS with MFM & RLL drives. The table shook when I formatted a hard drive.

A:>debug

-g=c800:5

Ah, you young'uns with your 40MB drives. My first was a full-height 10MB drive on my Sirius 1. That thing was life-changing.

Someone gave me a 30GB drive the other day. I still haven't figured a use for it?

Yep I owned a 40 meg drive. I remember when very large applications appeared (50 megs) wondering how it was even at all possible, and whether it made sense.

It also meant lots of highly unreliable floppies !

I did the same sort of thing with a broken iPod hard drive. If it was squeezed, it would work; the fix was to put a folded business card in-between the exterior back plate and the drive. That would squeeze it enough that it'd work. Never heated up enough to start a fire, either, so it was safe!

Oh man I remember doing that to eke out a little more life from several mp3 players, one or two Creatives and an Sansa e200. There was also one with a sliding door over an SD card with 32MB that I had to pop open and try to fix. I think that was around 2003? I'm pretty sure I upgraded to a 64MB card at some point.

Shims were plastic cards, subway tickets, and occasionally toothpicks as an adjustable clamp while I was trying to figure out where the failure was.

I've had to do that to make batteries stay connected in various devices; I've also made shims out of folded aluminum foil when battery contacts are just too far apart; and used a penny (with the edges coated) to shim a light socket where the end of the fixture made it impossible to screw the proper bulb in all the way. Good times :D

Same. In 1990 was a field service engineer at a PC shop. We used to use circuit cooler or "cold spray" as we used to call it.

We had three levels of hard drive data recovery that we did in order. Usually didn't have to get past #2.

1. Put it into another computer

2. Cold spray the heck out of it and see if it works for an hour

3. Remove the circuit board of the drive and replace it with the circuit board from a matching known working drive

If it didn't work after that and they 100% needed the data we sent it out to Ontrack. They'd put it in their clean room, remove the platters and read the data directly.

That last trick no longer works. Too much trickery with NV storage on the board. The last time I did this successfully is about a decade ago.

Reminds me of one I had where it would start clicking and file access froze, so I would turn it side ways and bang it against the table, it seemed to unstick it.

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