Hi All -

In my previous post I told everyone I was recycling computers for charities. I have a barrel full of hdd. I am not kidding a BARREL chock full of them. Any ways I was testing a couple and learning to use the software.

Disconnecting and reconnecting live power often means fried equipment so I built a test box out of a old p2 300 and put a switch on the power cable by leaving the the black ground cables alone and opening and closing the colored power lines. A switch from a old style power supply works great! (tip #1) Use the stop command to spin down the drive before disconnecting. I sorted the good (or easy fixes) from the bad and it went pretty fast as I only brought 10 home. About 1/4 worked off the bat.

I fixed another set by reading one of your guys post that said to erase a drive with bad sectors then scan it (tip #2). I didn't think that would work, but it did - I tested the crap out of it and it held up. Only time will tell for sure but it seems stable. Before doing this - XP crapped out formating it everytime - Afterward XP loved it. At this point my recovery rate was about 50/50. (Thanks Everyone!!)

I it happened upon this by accident ( I got lazy ) Most of the drives were missing the jumpers - at first I was setting all of them to master and then testing them. After a bit I stopped setting the jumper (ie no jumper = CS ?) and it seemed to work for the most part. But when I put them in a machine I always set the jumper to Master and some of the drives that passed in my test set wouldn't work. After some experimentation I discovered about a fourth of my test drives would only work if set to cable select (tip #3). Very Wierd. But that little trick got my recovery rate up to about 75% (Wahoo! Thanks again!) and most of the drives were of a good size (30G+). I would like to give these tips to the other newbies out there and ask if anyone knows why?

Again -
Will a drive with bad sectors stay stable if erased and then rescanned?
Why will a drive fail using M/S but work with Cable Select?
Any other simular tips & tricks I should know about?
A FAQ with these kind of things in them would be AWESOME!

Thanks -
Snuggie aka Darin

Hi Snuggie,

good - after you've done with MHDD, erase waits and remap,
get manufacturer's utilitities :

Powermax for Maxtor
Data Lifeguard for WD and so on and
run their "LLF" - zero sector write option.

Probably some drives which look good will fail here
and give you better results if you want to use these
drives.

Thanks-

I will go get the OEM utils -
Isn't that what Mhdd does when it erases the drive? I am not question you and your methods so much as trying to learn how each piece works.

Also you must realize that my situation is quite different then most of yours in that I am testing to see IF a component will fail - Where as you are testing why and where it is failing. My buddy get a fee for recycling computers from the owner and then gets a additional three cents a pound for the processed components. He gets the fee regardless so if I take a part off his hand it is less then a buck out of his pocket. Most of the time the parts work! People often foolishly think that it is cheaper to buy a new machine then fix the problem. They will throw out good equipment and go buy a 400 dollar Dell special. The only problem I have is that his workers really seem to relish destroying computers because the fun factor is higher then processing x-ray film or pipe fittings. Usually by the time I get there they are in little piles - Plastic, metal and electronics. They ruin good equipment all the time - even more frustrating is they set aside the 486's for me to take home. Grrrrrr.

All that said I build machines for charities - and one of the biggest challenges is finding working memory and hard-drives. Most people know enough to transfer those to other machines. Anything I can recover in that area is a big plus. MHDD is a HUGE help in that area.

Again thanks for the help!

Kind regards-
Snuggie aka Darin