[clug] Drive failure

[Eyal Lebedinsky]

peter wrote:
> 
> A friend has just had a five year old, 40Gb Fujitsu hard drive fail 
> with  no warning.
> All attempts to rescue the data on the drive were fruitless, as it 
> would  not even spin up.
> Google found some Australian sites offering professional data recovery  
> <approx.$800> and the information that the main chip on the drive  
> controller was known to fail on a range of Fujitsu drives. To make 
> matters  worse, you cannot just swap the board for a known good one, and 
> when the  chip fails, it writes gibberish to the drive.
> So the moral of the story is; always do your back-ups, and think about  
> replacing that old drive.
> Pete

You are not saying what model. I had a number of Fujitsu 40GD disks fail
on me, all are IDE disks modem MPG3409AT. The failure was always in the
electronics and installing a working pcb allowed me to recover the data.
The data was never hurt by the disk failure.

I had these replaced by Fujitsu, and some more than once, within the
warranty period. They were always very prompt with their service (unlike
Maxtor which is always a disaster to deal with).

I still have a working one (retired before it failed when I lost my nerve)
and can help you replace the pcb to recover the data.

And yes, do your backups regularly for when the disks fail. They always do.

So, is this the model?

-- 
Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal at eyal.emu.id.au) <http://samba.org/eyal/>
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