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Reviving a Seagate ST-225 MFM HDD

I have one ST-225 that doesn't make that sound but ISTR other ST-225s that I used to have that did. I currently have one ST-238R that does make that same sound. It always did and the ST-238R is the same hardware as the ST-225.
 
SomeGuy said:
It is possible that "ta-ta-ta-ta" is normal for your drive. Is it anything like this?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPoawKOHjQ4

Now, I believe the ST-225s varied quite a bit during their production lifetime, so some may make different diagnostic sounds at start up than others.
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Wow, that was really helpful! You are right, the sound is much alike, but further searching brought me to this youtube video which shows exacly what my drive sounds like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUYo6F1Xt3I

So this is normal?? who would have thought, but I'm convinced :)

The thing is, I have 2 other ST-225s in my 5162, and none of the sound like that (at all), but they are probably other variants.
 
Quit running all that damn snake oil software and just LLF from the controller as previously mentioned and if the problem persists there is nothing you can do, plus bad blocks are bad blocks. Once they are found you've lost that space for good.

The beauty of SpinRite is that it performs a non-destructive LLF. So the drive gets a new, fresh LLF without losing its data.
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Nonsense. SpinRite is a great disk Utility but NOT a LLF utility. You're wasting your time trying to LLF using it. Just do it the proper way.
 
mrmanse said:
So this is normal?? who would have thought, but I'm convinced :)

The thing is, I have 2 other ST-225s in my 5162, and none of the sound like that (at all), but they are probably other variants.
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I'd speculate that is normal or "normal enough" :)

It is interesting watching that with the cover off. It looks like it is trying to exercise the stepper motor before doing a proper track zero seek. In the process it looks and sounds like it tries to seek BELOW track zero, probably ignoring the track zero sensor and hitting the stop in the process. There is probably a valid reason for this, and it may be specific to certain models of parts.

Anyway, if there were a problem with the stepper or head seeking, Spinrite's or Calibrate's seek test would fall flat on its face.

NeXT said:
Nonsense. SpinRite is a great disk Utility but NOT a LLF utility. You're wasting your time trying to LLF using it. Just do it the proper way.
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Spinrite does LLF MFM and RLL drives on standard controllers. That is how it can change the interleave.

But some people do have exaggerated ideas as to what it can do. For example, you never want to run it on a damaged drive full of important data.

On the other hand, over the ages I have found its pattern testing useful for finding weak/bad sectors that a fresh LLF or other disk testers would miss (until one day DOS craps out reading a file). No, not as good as a signal level analysis that a manufacture might do, but if you are not a hard drive manufacturer, then what else are you going to do?
 
SomeGuy said:
Spinrite does LLF MFM and RLL drives on standard controllers. That is how it can change the interleave.
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One thing Spinrite cannot do is handle bad sector exclusion properly. In a traditional LLF utility (such as those built into the controller and accessible via debug.com), you manually enter the defect list into the utility before you LLF. Those sectors in the list found by the factory (who has much more sensitive equipment than we do) are then permanently marked as bad and always return errors if you try to access them. You want this, because you don't want to store data in a sector that isn't guaranteed by the factory to read and write data perfectly.

You should always LLF a drive for initial operation using the controller's routine, and enter the defect list printed on the drive. You can then run spinrite on it all you like; it will always fail on the sectors you entered from the defect list, and that's what you want.
 
NeXT said:
Nonsense. SpinRite is a great disk Utility but NOT a LLF utility.
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Sounds like you're expressing a personal, unfounded opinion rather than actual facts. If you've got something other than your say-so to substantiate this claim I'd be interested in reading it.
 
Trixter said:
You should always LLF a drive for initial operation using the controller's routine, and enter the defect list printed on the drive. You can then run spinrite on it all you like; it will always fail on the sectors you entered from the defect list, and that's what you want.
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You sound like you believe that SpinRite can be run on a raw, unformatted drive, which it cant! SpinRite *only* runs on valid partitions that can be accessed by DOS. If you've used SpinRite you should be familiar with that feature.
 
Stone said:
Sounds like you're expressing a personal, unfounded opinion rather than actual facts. If you've got something other than your say-so to substantiate this claim I'd be interested in reading it.
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Sure thing; how about this: https://groups.google.com/forum/mes....pc.hardware.storage/9CvsLZo5V38/ugOXpHD7sN0J
Those are comments from someone who worked directly with hard drive manufacturing.

He points out that while there were benefits to using it on MFM/RLL drives, those were incidental; also, he states that nearly all claims Spinrite made for IDE drives are invalid because you can't LLF IDE drives.

Stone said:
You sound like you believe that SpinRite can be run on a raw, unformatted drive, which it cant! SpinRite *only* runs on valid partitions that can be accessed by DOS. If you've used SpinRite you should be familiar with that feature.
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I was making no such claim, only stating what a proper MFM-from-scratch workflow should be. If your drive has an attached defect list, you've got to LLF and enter those in, or those sectors will come back to haunt you someday regardless of what Spinrite says. (Spinrite 6.0 works with unformatted drives, btw. But, Spinrite 6.0 only works with IDE drives and drops support for all others.)

I purchased Spinrite II and upgraded to 5.0, both in the 1990s. I grew disillusioned with the program but still pre-ordered 6.0 in hopes that the complete re-write would offer some additional features that you really need for drive recovery, such as the ability to restore damaged files to a different device. What we got instead was larger IDE support and a SMART display (which is a display only, there is no indication it is used for anything other than notifying the user that their drive has surpassed a SMART threshold). It is precisely because I have used it so much over the years that I speak against it.

Spinrite is good for quickly determining what the optimal interleave is for a particular system+controller+drive combination, and I still use it for that. But after that determination, I always LLF the drive using the controller's built-in facility. And there's no point to using Spinrite on IDE drives for any reason because it can't actually do anything to fix them.
 
I don't know why you're even bringing IDE into the discussion here since we're specifically talking about SpinRite II 2.0 which doesn't know or care about IDE. That's the only SpinRite I use, know about and discuss. :) As far as I'm concerned the later SpinRite releases were not of use or interest to me.
 
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