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From: tcm@srhqla.UUCP (Tim Meighan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: MYSTERIOUS hard disk problem!
Summary: Expires:
Keywords: natural forces in an ST-251 (heat)
Message-ID: <679@srhqla.UUCP>
Date: 6 Jun 89 22:24:04 GMT
Reply-To: tcm@srhqla.UUCP (Tim Meighan)
Organization: Silent Radio, Los Angeles
Lines: 29

In article <767@hydra.gatech.EDU> russ@prism.gatech.EDU
(Russell Shackelford) writes:

>have a ST-251, formatted w/ ontrack to be a 9mb & a 33mb
>works just fine MOST of the time, but occasionally DISAPPEARS. when
>this happens, i get a hard disk error message.

Russ, this sounds like a thermal problem.  Something is getting hot and
humid and going south on you.

The classic symptom of most thermal failures is that they seem to come and
go for no apparant reason.  If you're SURE you've absolutely eliminated 
funky cables, loose connectors, cold solder joints at the connectors, chips
not seated in sockets, incorrect use of the drive card, wrong setup, etc,
and the problem is still there, then it's probably failing from heat.

One way to tell is to start with a cool drive, then heat it up quickly with
a blow dryer.  If it starts to fail, at least you know the reason. 
Unfortunately, thermal failures are even harder to fix than they are to 
verify.  I had a system with a similar problem, which I "fixed" by leaving
the cover off the computer.  As long as it was uncovered, it worked fine.
This is not a very good way to take care of such troubles, though.

Much as I hate to say it, if your data is really important (and whose isn't),
you should get rid of any drive that cannot be made to work properly.  It
will only make you very, very unhappy to continue using it.

Tim Meighan
SilentRadio