Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!helps!bigtex!james
From: james@bigtex.cactus.org (James Van Artsdalen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: HD doesn't spin after power on ???
Message-ID: <48235@bigtex.cactus.org>
Date: 3 Oct 90 12:57:09 GMT
References: <19860002@hpwad.HP.COM> <19860004@hpwad.HP.COM>
Reply-To: james@bigtex.cactus.org (James Van Artsdalen)
Organization: Institute of Applied Cosmology, Austin TX
Lines: 21

In <19860004@hpwad.HP.COM>, mleiber@hpwad.HP.COM (#Michael Leiber) wrote:

> Thanks to all who responded. It finally came out that the cause of the
> problem must be the so called "stiction", which seems to be well known
> for Seagates drives (at least some mentioned it). At least for bunch
> of drives, Seagate used a lubricant on the drive spindle which is too
> heavy and causes the spindle to sometimes stick at all. The drive
> motor then is not strong enough to unstick, so ...

I have seen several 150meg CDC ESDI drives "stick" like this.  Within
a few seconds of powering up the drive LED starts blinking and the
drive does nothing.  I take the drives out of the chassis and shake it
around the spindle axis.  Don't shake the drive back and forth: twist
so that the platter moves.  So far this has always worked.  Maybe your
drive's failure mode is similar.

PS. I still like the CDC 150meg ESDI drive: that's what I used in all
of my (DOS) development machines.
-- 
James R. Van Artsdalen          james@bigtex.cactus.org   "Live Free or Die"
Dell Computer Co    9505 Arboretum Blvd Austin TX 78759         512-338-8789