Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!samsung!uunet!mcsun!corton!irisa!irisa.fr!jorgense
From: jorgense@irisa.fr (Finn Jorgensen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: Hard drive repair...For do-it-yourselfers.
Message-ID: <1991Jun27.161955.10144@irisa.fr>
Date: 27 Jun 91 16:19:55 GMT
References: <16731@gdc.portal.com> <1991Jun26.061359.28370@marlin.jcu.edu.au>
Sender: news@irisa.fr
Reply-To: jorgense@irisa.fr (Finn Jorgensen)
Organization: Irisa, Rennes(FR)
Lines: 21

One more horror story about repairing hard drives : An original IBM-AT drive
in our lab started making noises like ... (well, very loud and nasty noises).
It still worked, but finally refused to spin. Evidently, something inside 
touched the platters. We telephoned IBM to ask for an exchange. At that time
the price was around $ 1600 for this 20 Mb drive. Another vendor sold similar
drives for $ 1000 - 1200, so we decided to scrap the old one and buy a new.
Before throwing it into the garbage can, curiosity pushed us to open it up, 
just to understand what went wrong. In fact, the air filter, round and about
the size of a platter, was attached to the drive cover using some kind of
double-sided tape, and it got loose and dropped on the top platter. Both the
filter and the top platter were severly marked, but we noticed that there
was no head over the top surface, so we blew away the large quantities of
black dust that had accumulated inside the drive, using a compressor, fixed
the filter by drilling two holes through the cover and the filter and screwing
the wole thing together and put the cover back. To our surprise, everything
worked perfectly, not a single bit got lost, and the drive worked flawlessly
for over a year. It finally gave up, but for another reason (power surge).

I won't recommend using this technique, but as a last resort, why not ?

Finn Jorgensen