Viking II HD Not Recognised

You may be seeing the "stiction" problem, where the lubricant on the platters gets stuck to the heads and immobilizes everything. Jogging the side of the drive has been known to free the mechanism.

Note that you want the equivalent of hitting it with the heel of your hand, NOT hitting it with a hammer! Dropping it from more than a few inches inflicts tremendous forces and is not recommended.

David,

My recomendation is as follows. Find an old CD-ROM drive at a thrift store or comuter recycler. Remove the ROM drive and put your HDD in its place. Connect only the power leads and turn on the power Leave the cover off the external case, just be careful to not touch AC wires. Do not bother connecting the drive to the computer, just use it for powering up the drive.

Listen for the platters to start spinning. If they do not, take a medium size screw driver. Hold it with the plastic handle down and one half inch above the screw that holds the center spindle of the drive platters. Let the screw driver drop gently on that center point to see if that will jiggle the mechanism free. Repeat a time or two if you get no response.

As a last resort, you can remove the top cover and hand start the platters, back up data and then retire the drive. You will not be able to trust the dirve after that.

Jim

David,

If the power leads will reach, great. Go ahead and test the drive in the computer. I prefer testing components in place except for hard drive mechanical issues. Better to isolate the hard drive than to bang around on things that do work.

Your comments lead us to believe that the platters are not spinning up. By isolating the drive, you can put your ear right on the drive and listen for the noise of the drive spinning up. In an external case, you can unplug the fan so the only noise you will hear is the drive motor.

The notes from ASP indicate that the CPU sees the drive and can identify it but no volume mounted. It is not unusual for the PCI card information to not be entirely acurate, no device connected.

There are many reasons for a drive not to mount. If you have a backup of the drive and do not care about the contents of the drive, trying to initialize the drive will tell you if the drive is responding normally. We assume that you have data to protect so that would not be the best 'next step.'

Jim

It is normal for the card to show up as a PCI slot card.
It is normal for it NOT to list the drives under the card, but to list them on the "SCSI Busses".

What is not normal is that your drive cannot find any partitons or driver version, and is "not ready/No Volumes Mounted" which usually means platters did not spin up or heads did not deploy. The drive controller is happily telling you its Maker & Model, so the controller appears to be answering queries from the CPU.

If you haven't yet, try XPF v3.1. It seems to be the sweet spot for Panther. It's about 60 percent down this page.

AJ

David,

Are you giving up on the SCSI drive? Sounds like it has died. Was there data on the drive that you wanted to salvage? Have you tried the tapping option to try and jump start the platters?

The last thing I had to start with a love tap was the relay on our well. I thought it was the pressure switch but it turned out to be electrical, not mechanical. I think your issues are mechanical if you can not hear the platter spin.

Allan can walk you through XPF as well as anyone. I will defer to him on software.

Good luck.

Jim

David,

"I disconnected the sled, slid it out and restarted. There's no "...screw that holds the center spindle of the drive platters..." It has a fairly smooth top; the bottom has all the electronics. "

Out of 100 hard drives I have taken apart, 99 have had spindle screws. Typically they are under a piece of tamper proof tape that helps enforce hard drive warranties. Sometimes, the hard drive cover is smooth with no tape and so the spindle screw is concealed under the printed circuit board. The existence of the screw is not vital. It is helpful just knowing where it would be visible if you had x-ray vision so the love tap is centered if at all possible.

"Anyhow, I held it by the sides on restart and gave it a couple taps. Actually, it feels like the platter is spinning inside but it's a very quiet drive, I reckon. "

If you think you hear the hard drive platters spinning, they should continue to spin. The startup chatter is the heads coming out of park position. ( Some of us remember having to park drive heads before shutting down our computers.) There is typically an electro magnet that holds the heads off to the side, out of harming data's way. The click you hear is the release of the electromagnet and the back and forth movement of the head arms. That arm movement makes a chattering noise during active searches on a fragmented drive.

"Same thing happens - it whirr-clicks a couple times and a green light flashes a couple times then...it's quiet but I can feel that it seems to be 'operating'."

No more love taps if you can feel the constant vibration (highly tuned vibration at that) of the drive spindle motor. At this point, the drive needs to be connected to the interface cable to receive commands. The drive activity LED indicates that electronically, the drive is ready for use. Next, double check the jumpers on the drive. Some settings allow for delayed motor startup, etc.. Shut things down before reconnecting.

Start up and listen for the whir and then the clicks. This is where I would put the drive in an external case and move it from machine to machine to see if that would make a difference.

Post the detailed model information on the drive so we can look up specs and rule out certain issues.

Ji˜m

David,

I am in full agreement about not questioning the jumper settings, just raising questions about all posibilities. Anything human or mechanical is subject to failure with or without explaination.

Still scratching my head over what to do next. Oh, I remember, I jumped on the web to look up specs on a Micropolis drive that came in a SCSI tower I just picked up. It chatters and causes the G3 to freeze until I turn off power to the tower. Drive Setup will not seek connected drives while the external tower power is on. Who knows the history of this drive or if I can even find a spec sheet for it!

Good luck. You may be well on your way to a set of 9 gig wind chimes. lo;

Jim

David,

Going back to your original post and picking it apart for clues and options, I wonder:

"It's connected to the Atto SCSI card. ... ... ... Is the issue with the SCSI card or the HD? ... ... ... ASP does not see it. "

Have you tried using it on the external SCSI port to see if ASP would even see it?

Jim