Shattered, not spun

Post #37,874 by kmself 5/7/02 11:30:02 PM Reply	Shattered, not spun The question is whether or not (and how) the drive is recoverable. I'd dropped a well-loved and much used [link\|http://www.lnx-bbc.org/\|LNX-BBC] "business card" format CD into my drive tray and booted, to diagnose some GRUB issues. I'd previously noted that the disk looked like it had seen better days. Drive start up was followed almost instantly by a loud "CRACK!" Opening the tray door, pieces of the CD, more-or-less quartered, tumbled out. One sliver is missing, presumably still inside the drive. One of my questions concerns best methods for fishing this out. Then again, if there are bits of CD in the drive, other media would probably prefer not going in after them. Drive itself is a Toshiba XM-7602B ATAPI CD/DVD Drive, a 48x CDROM drive. Google Groups has several articles regarding similar results, though more typically with 56x drives. Some reports have the disk fragments, spinning at 10,000 RPM, flying through the thin plastic of the drive doors, something you might want to keep in mind when placing racks or servers at or near eye level. I'd strongly recommend that any media with visible physical damage not be put in a high-performance CDR drive. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] [link\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/\|[link\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/]] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand? Keep software free. Oppose the CBDTPA. Kill S.2048 dead. [link\|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html\|[link\|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html\|http://www.eff.org/...a_alert.html]]`
Post #37,880 by Meerkat 5/8/02 2:00:13 AM Reply	Well, chucking in an AOL cd wouldn't be a big investment Though you may feel dirty afterwards. Or chuck a CD-R of something in there just to see what will happen. Failing that, treat it like you're rebooting an Etch-a-sketch. :) I had CD-ROM drive trouble recently - tray was dislodged from its track - and just pulled it apart, put the tray back in place, reassembled the drive and it's been happy ever since. There's usually only a few parts inside, it's easily done, and I didn't manage to upset any of the finely calibrated clever bits. And if all else fails, it's only a one to two hundred dollars down the tube isn't it? I'll keep in mind the away-from-eye-level thing though, definitely. Last time I broke a CD was when I frisbeed a dud CD-R at the wall. Crack! Lots of glitter floating down the stairwell, looked rather pretty :) On and on and on and on, and on and on and on goes John.
Post #37,889 by kmself 5/8/02 3:40:53 AM Reply	Seems to be OK ...the drive, that is. I've taped up the disk an pinned it to my wallboard. Pulled the drive, cracked open the case, shard came right out. Decided to try to ensure I scratched the lense with whatever else was in there by blasting canned air into it a few times. Nothing else crawled out. Less hassle than sorting out SCSI/IDE boot orders afterwards. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] [link\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/\|[link\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/]] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand? Keep software free. Oppose the CBDTPA. Kill S.2048 dead. [link\|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html\|[link\|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html\|http://www.eff.org/...a_alert.html]]`
Post #38,375 by static 5/12/02 8:49:39 AM Reply	Dismantling CD-ROM drives. I'll admit I will take things apart to see what the look like inside. CD-ROM drives seem ideal, for some reason, though the last three times I pulled one apart was to see how to get the front off (so I could paint it). I would say that the key bits of a CD-ROM drive are engineered in a way that lots of other elements in the end-product are not real fussy and can definitely stand up to a bit of punishment (such as dismantling the things) without failing. After all, the tech has been around long enough! My dad likes to tell a story about a mini HiFi unit he was diagnosing and noticed that he could hold the carriage of the CD player still while it was playing and it kept playing flawlessly! When he let it go, it moved nearly a centimetre to where it wanted to be, but still it kept playing flawlessly. :-) Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #38,391 by kmself 5/12/02 6:22:36 PM Reply	A/D I believe there's a significant delta between analog and digital equipment. Given that CD players are now standard in automobiles, their ability to handle rapid, strong, and repeated accellerations and vibrations must be quite high. Too, analog audio is far more forgiving of spurious bits of bad data. You're already doing multi-pass, buffering advanced reads, and automatically correcting for all sorts of conditions in the bitstream. If you do get a few bad bits, you're not likely to hear it, and the whole performance won't screech to a halt. Not so with data. That said, yes the technology seems pretty robust. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] [link\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/\|[link\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/]] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand? Keep software free. Oppose the CBDTPA. Kill S.2048 dead. [link\|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html\|[link\|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html\|http://www.eff.org/...a_alert.html]]`

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