Near-death experience with a hard drive

Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (More info?)

The drive connector could possibly have become corroded in five years. Or maybe
one of the leads loosened up... Ben Myers

On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 22:02:24 -0600, "Peter B. Steiger"
<see.sig@for.email.address> wrote:

>A bizarre thing happened the other day... I've been using this Optiplex
>GX-1 for about five years in my home office, and in the middle of the day
>it went into a coma. No mouse action, no keyboard action... except if I
>hit the Windows button (it's running NT 4.0) the task list would appear,
>but then I couldn't select anything. I figured, one of the umpteen
>applications running finally drained the last of the 512K RAM and it
>needed to be rebooted - heck, with Windows you come to expect that kind of
>thing daily.
>
>Anyway, the fun part was when it restarted and said "No boot device
>available". Powered off for a few minutes, tried again, same message. A
>bootup with a Win98 floppy disk so I could run FDISK turned up no drives
>installed.
>
>I opened it up and put the "dead" drive into another computer, and it
>worked fine. I also put a different drive in the GX-1 and the new drive
>worked fine. Put the original drive back in the GX-1... no boot device
>available.
>
>The only difference between the test drive and the original drive was that
>I used a different power connector, so I put the original drive on the
>other power connector... and hallelujah, everything worked again.
>Clearly, the power connector that the drive has been using these 5+ years
>was at fault.
>
>My question is, what could happen to a power connector in mid-operation
>like that without also taking out anything else? It was unusually hot
>that day, around 90 degrees, and being in Wyoming we don't have air
>conditioning, but nothing felt excessively hot when I opened it up, and I
>would have figured the drive itself would overheat, not the power
>connector.
>
>Oh well, it was a good reminder that I haven't backed up my irreplacable
>files onto the Linux server in several weeks. I'm just glad I got a
>second chance!
>
>--
>Peter B. Steiger
>Cheyenne, WY
>If you must reply by email, you can reach me by placing zeroes
>where you see stars: wypbs_**3 at bornagain.com.
>