The resurrection

AUTh Lab, Thessaloniki

Those of you who were around in Reading might recall the time when Q’s hard drive died. During a visit to London, he acquired a 60GB Hitachi drive to replace it and there are photos on his website detailing the replacement. That was last November. Then yesterday his new hard drive died. We took it out and determined that it was the hard drive not some other component. Today Q went to get a cheap replacement for it because, even if Hitachi would replace it, it would take a while. He also picked up a cheap laptop hard drive enclosure. He put the dead drive in it as a last ditch effort to access over one thousand photos on it. Plugging it into a Windows machine at school, the drive made more noises that are identical to what a Geiger counter makes. Not a good HD noise.

Pablo tried booting into Linux and mounting it that way – same noise, same lack of response. So as I was thinking of leaving the lab today, Q asked if I could try it on my laptop. I doubted anything would work, but relented, because why not? I plug it in – and it works. It mounts and I can access everything. I quickly get his photos and then start on other things that he had (6.5 GB in total) which now are sitting happily on my computer waiting until I can get a blank DVD from my hotel room. After copying the files, I unmounted the drive and we tried it on Daniel’s laptop. It works fine. No noises. So it seems that my lowly Mac is a bit of a miracle worker. It has revived the drive from the dead.

Q is now a Mac fan. :)

Written by Colin Bate