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[News] Seagate ST3660A neededANN.lu
Posted on 17-Jan-2001 15:48 GMT by Christian Kemp34 comments
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In the beginning of January, Allan Odgaard managed to short circuit his harddisk. His hope is that someone has an identical harddisk, from which he can borrow the control print to restore his data. "The model is a Seagate ST3660A and the drive parameters are 1057CYL-16HEADS-63SECT-545.5MB." Also see his original message.
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 1 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by PaulT on 16-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
Things must be slow here for Christian (apparently a good-hearted person) to bother with another luser who didn't have a backup and wants someone to go to a ton of trouble for a $30 hard disk. I'd suggest that Mr. Odgaard spend his time to assemble a list of reputable data-restoration companies who handle this sort of problem all of the time, who know what they're doing, and who charge realistic rates for their specialized expertise and equipment. When he finds out that businesses pay lots for critical data recovery, and that he's asking for a tough task, he will either pay the money, or he'll quit wasting our time and buy a new disk and use the time restoring his software to it.
Basically he's saying he will buy any disk of that model from you in exchange for a much better one, so that he can ruin a second one trying to transfer the drive electronics over. "Borrow the control print"?? If you happen to have one, hold out for a nice fast 20GB one at least, for your trouble.
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 2 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by yeah, anon on 16-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
You can't help? Well, it's ok. But please shut up then and don't waste our time with stupid posts like this. Thank You!
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 3 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Dave on 16-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (PaulT):
I'd hardly call Allan Odgaard a "luser" - I would have said look around his site, but it's been replaced by that message. He's written numerous MUI classes, and has his name on credit lists for OS3.5 and YAM (the only two I can think of ATM). And he contributes a lot to the amiga-c programming list on egroups. So losing his sources would be more than a $30 loss. However, I don't see that he'd spend vast amounts on recovering his data - after all he can't make much/any money from Amiga software, and he's a student. Equally, I don't see that he would enjoy re-writing everything he had from scratch if he cannot recover the data, which would be a loss to more people than just Allan.
By "control print", I think he means the printed circuit board which the control logic is on. It should be fairly separate from the mechanics of the HDD, apart from the obvious wires required for transferring data off the disks and controlling the motors. Depending how this has been done, it could be fairly simple to replace, or it could be difficult as you suggest. Sod's law indicates that it will be more difficult than it looks, and this will only become apparent after starting.
It would be too easy for me to say "he should have had a backup", and since I'm bad at keeping backups too, I won't mention it :)
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 4 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Christian Kemp on 16-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (PaulT):
Allan Odgaard is not just another user, but some people may remember him from IProbe, the very promising but never-beyond-alpha-version browser, or his HTML datatype whose name escapes me right now. Also, I used to be beta-tester of IProbe, and I was in email contact with him a few years ago.
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 5 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Darrin on 16-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (PaulT):
It's refreshing to see such a charitable attude such as yours in this new millenium. I hope that one day soon you'll be in need of assistance (such as requiring a new liver or heart) and someone writes you a letter telling you it's your fault for not having two. Perhaps you should buy yourself a second hand Jarvic 7 now - just in case :)
PS. Anyone remember the Jarvic 7 animation that came on the A2000 Workbench 1.2 disks? Ah the thrill of unpacking $4000 worth of computer hardware and only having a 5 second animation and a short piece of church organ music to demonstrate the computer's ability. Any people complain that the AmigaDE won't have enough software when it's launched???!!!
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 6 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 16-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 4 (Christian Kemp):
He did not create a html datatype, it was a html mui class. Just had to correct you on that. But if any one can help him then you should.
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 7 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Mads Bakholt on 16-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (PaulT):
You are such a cool guy, maybe even one of the coolest I've ever met - not! ;-( On the fatal day it happened I helped Allan replacing his old desktop case with a tower case of mine - it was a simple accident where we switched power on without noticing the HD being short-circuited by the case itself and "argh".
So if you're asking if we shouldn't have backed up his HD before attempting a case replacement - yes, in a perfect world but this time we missed your brightness and foreseenes! ;-|
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 8 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 16-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (PaulT):
Nobody backs up their data. It's not feasible to back up any size hard disk over 10Mb!!!!
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 9 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 16-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 8 (Anonymous):
I'm sorry that I can't help, but has he perhaps tried Pricewatch.com? He might be able to buy a same-model drive for $30 or so, and even with international shipping (somehow I doubt you're in the States) it might be cheaper than what a data recovery firm charges.
<This is not an ad, I'm trying to be helpful>I think I might've seen one of these going cheap on compgeeks.com but it's not there right now... If importing a drive (that'll probably cost no more than US$50 plus whatever outrageousness int'l shipping requires) is a possibility, my first thoughts would be to suggest compgeeks.com and compdisk.com; the former tends to have all sorts of old junk at reasonable prices, and I've had a pretty good time dealing with the latter (they seem to be the sort who keep rarities around for odd cases like this)...</"">
On the backup note, some of the newschool OEMs (Amiga partners, or anyone else for that matter) should look into finding a cheap, or at least sunk-into-the-cost-of-the-system way of providing MO storage. After looking at the options, I wouldn't screw around with anything else for business backups (aside from RAID, anyway), although the new burnsafe CD-Rs might make a nice solution if you wanted to do automatic dump-and-dispose backups. Of course, we could've had this years ago (and really nice portable MP3 players now) if Sony hadn't decided to sink MD-Data.
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 10 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 16-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
All he has to do is find a local company that recycles second-hand PCs, ie from office clear-outs and refurbs, and ask them if they have any duff [1] hard drives they are not using.
[1] bad blocks
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 11 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Troels Ersking on 16-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 3 (Dave):
With my (very) old western digital HD it was just a matter of plugging the circuit board in the port (just like the car stereo frontpanel), there was no wires at all. So he could be lucky that it is quite easy. Anyway he has probably allready checked to see if it is doable.
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 12 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by AdmV0rl0n on 16-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (PaulT):
Why did you post this critical comment ? Alan has always done fantastic work for all of us amiga users.
If you have`nt got anything good to say, why not keep your lousy mouth shut ?
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 13 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by the man in the shadows on 16-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
Sorry Allen... I'd give you the drive if I had it. I've got a local warehouse near here that sell refurbished components that I might be able to scrounge through. So far, I've not had that much luck with the local stores. I always try and keep my stuff backed up even though it's not essential to have. Having a 20GB hard drive and putting everything on that drive would be bad if I lost everything. Thank god for CDRW drives.
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 14 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by amorel on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 8 (Anonymous):
"Nobody backs up their data. It's not feasible to back up any size hard disk over 10Mb!!!!"
But it IS feasible to back up SOURCES.
Even the linux kernel source packs down to a mere 20 mb.
The fact he never backed up any of his sources to, say, floppy, 2nd hd, whatever, is beyond me.
Whenever I save a project I also save it to disk(the sources yet dont exceed 800kb) and
at regular intervals I lha whole source dirs(and music etc.) and copy them to another hd.
It`s not that hard is it?
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 15 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 14 (amorel):
It's not hard, it just interupts your work-flow! And if you're really concentrating on your programming, the last thing you think about it backing up sources.
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 16 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by ehaines on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 8 (Anonymous):
: Nobody backs up their data.
I must be Nobody then. :)
: It's not feasible to back up any size hard disk over 10Mb!!!!
Either this is some kind of silly joke, or you meant 10GB.
Anyway, I have an 18GB drive, and it's backed up. Of course,
only about 3GB is in use so far, but even if I manage to fill
it, everything will be backed up. It's not like you do the
whole drive at once you know...just a partition at a time. Sure
it would be a major hassle to back up onto Zip disks or something,
but just get something sensible like the 640MB MO drive I've got,
and backing up is simple. I assume it would be even easier with
a DVD-RAM drive.
Unless you don't care about anything on your hard drive, anyone
who doesn't back up is an idiot. Sorry. It takes a matter of
moments to start the process, and though it may take a little
while to finish, you can always do something else in the meantime.
Amigas do multitask ya know....
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 17 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Kelly Samel on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
The same thing happend to me with a Fujitsu drive, here is how I fixed it. Go on EBay and find the same drive model, buy it. Simply swap out the circuit board and your drive is saved. I got my drive from a company called Bason Computers, they are highly reccomended. I hope that helps.
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 18 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by DanDude on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
I was lucky enough to find and purchase a SCSI-2 tape back up drive. And with
the Travan tapes (popular kind here), store a great deal of data. I'm using the
TR-4's A.T.M. (4GB uncompressed/8GB compressed) and backing up the 3 drives
saved me a lot of headaches. TR-5's are out now (5GB unc./10GB compr.)
(BTW, SCSI-3 tape drives don't work well unless you can find a backup prg that
can handle SCSI-3 commands regardless of the interface bus.)
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 19 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Allan Odgaard on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 14 (amorel):
I'm not sure why the need for backups are discussed, if a cyclist is run over in traffic, do you remain on the sidewalk and argue that he should have worn a helmet?
You ask why I never backup my sources, to put it in a nutshell:
· I had a backup, but formatted the harddisk to make room for Linux and the AmigaSDK.
· I was going to install a scsi-harddisk (while switching cabinet etc.) to allow easy backup (it's not trivial to backup data when you have two almost full IDE harddisks in your Amiga). And it was while doing this, that one of the harddisks was short circuited.
But even if I had my older backup then I would still be without my latest project, which (despite all the personal data) is the most important thing, as it's what I currently work on...
Regarding the other thread, about bothering people with news about Joe User in trouble then I can certainly understand that this is not the goal of Amiga news forums -- but with the danger of sounding arrogant then I'm currently involved in two projects which I'm sure (if released) will please a lot of Amiga users, so I'd say that I'm not the only one gaining from restoring my sources... :-)
As a final happy note I can add that I've received several offers of the harddisk I seek -- this and some of the quite flattering comments posted here convince me that people like Paul T. are the exception to the rule about the loyal and friendly Amiga community!
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 20 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Lightning on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 8 (Anonymous):
uhm, yes people do back up their hard drives - i back mine up (ok, admittedly its quarterly, but its done) to CD... and if you REALLY want to back things up, a tape drive is great for this :)
Lightning
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 21 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 19 (Allan Odgaard):
Projects - tell us more? :)
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 22 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Chris on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 8 (Anonymous):
No, it`s quite feasable to do backups of several Gb of HD. With a CD burner all
you need to do is create a reference backup containing your full system and then
to incremental backups from then on. I do daily incremental backups to a second
HD, a monthly incremental to CD and an annual reference backup. But I am the
exception rather than the rule - I was burned early on in my computing life -
and few people have the time or patience to do it..
I'm not criticising Allan, if I had a suitable seagate I'd have sent the board
in the post by now, just pointing out that large scale backups are possible if
you have experience in doing them and the time to set it all up.
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 23 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 22 (Chris):
I wouldn't pay a hundred pounds for a CD-R just in case my hard drive screws up - there's only a one in million chance!!! It'd be like me writing goodbye letters to my family everytime I went out, on the offchance something would happen! :P
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 24 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by J on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 19 (Allan Odgaard):
You're not coding an automatic backup program are you? :)
Sorry. Good luck with recovering your scources!
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 25 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Lightning on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 23 (Anonymous):
yes, but you dont buy a CDR to back up your hard drive(s) - at least i didnt
its just a handy second function for it that has already saved me once from a Diabalo backup that corrupted the file tree - got back 70% from that and the rest from a 2 month old backup of the same partition...
Lightning
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 26 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Mathew Ignash on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
There are several drives of this exact type listed for sale on ebay, from $1 up.
http://search-desc.ebay.com/search/search.dll?MfcISAPICommand=GetResult&ht=1&query=Seagate+ST3660A&srchdesc=y&category0=&minPrice=&maxPrice=&ebaytag1=ebayreg&ebaytag1code=0&SortProperty=MetaEndSort&SortOrder=%5Ba%5D&st=0
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 27 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by PaulT on 17-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
Well, well. Maybe I was in a poor mood when I read the original post. So were a lot of folks who insulted me on my response! Since YOU have all wasted your time already, I can do so once again. I'll be using the time-honored rhetorical question method.
Here's a moderated, world-wide Amiga community resource, ANN. Supposed to, and generally does, contain high quality information about the community, the developments, the future. I've supported it all along by clicking through, offering encouragement, personal notes to the operator, etc. It belongs to Christian, who I complimented in my post. How, I ask, does a post about an isolated disk failure make it to the front page of this resource?
Is the subject guy a luser? This term traditionally means someone who is clue-impaired in some way. My opinion was that this was not a screw-up that was unforeseeable. Anybody can make a silly mistake. Not keeping backups of important sourcevery silly mistake. Does AO's worthy accomplishments in the computing and Amiga fields make the mistake less devastating? No. Fine, use some other label that means,"He is a professional who should have known better" and remove luser.
Is backup of large disks impractical? Ask anyone who's lost one without a backup, especially someone who makes their living with that data. THEY DON'T GENERALLY LET IT HAPPEN A SECOND TIME. CDBurners are now cheap. SCSI or other tape drives haven't always been cheap but I sure have one. What is the cheapest and fastest way to backup? Write your source to a couple of floppies as was pointed out. Do so every time you make a major change. What is the second easiest, and by far the fastest? Buy a second disk and make an image of your first one. So AO was trying to do this? He could have bought the backup IDE disk, made his image copy, THEN installed a complex SCSI installation of whatever sort caused the meltdown. He worked on his own machine and a friend helped out for free? They got their money's worth from saving the cost of that service technician, didn't they?
Why did Christian put this on the main page instead of maybe the unmoderated, low-priority area? He wanted to help a compatriot. On ANY newsgroup, a much more casual and high noise area, this would be considered massively off-topic and flamebait. OK, so it's his Web site. Consider this then my criticism of Christian's actions. And this discussion's very low rating reflects every one's opinion that _it didn't belong here_ to contribute to the quality of an important community resource.
I wish AO the best of luck. I'm a user group president who's educated and assisted scores of Amiga users, and saved a few from hard disk crashes. "One in a million chance" for hard disk failure? Wrong. And when it happens to you, if you haven't saved your important files somewhere else, you will remember this discussion and have learned the hard way. Hundreds of hours of personal effort at risk really is the cost for not having backups.
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 28 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Chris on 18-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 23 (Anonymous):
Let me tell you a bit of history - back in 1993 or 1994 I was writing a game
somewhat like Hired Guns. I had developed the code and artwork from scratch
and I was nearly to the point where I was going to contact a publisher about
it. Even looking back on the design notes now, it had quite a bit of potential.
Sure it could have done with some better graphics here or there, a few
optimisations but it was more or less a working game, I'd even done a few
production-quality levels for it.
What I hadn`t done was any backups. I couldn`t back up to CD of course, but
disks or another HD would have done. But I didn`t. Tempting providence
is never a good idea and one spectacular crash took out two partitions on the
hard drive. Hours of work with recovery tools left me with bits of the code
and some rough graphics. The rest was gone, messed up beyond recovery. It was
over a year before I did any programming after that.
The moral? CD Burners may cost a lot but what is that compared to the ability
to ensure that months or years of work is safe? I could have made thousands
or more from that game, but not backing meant it was consigned to the great
data bin in the sky and I got nothing. I have two Cd burners at home - one
in my Amiga and one in my PC. Both are used regularly simply to ensure that
I never, ever again have to experience that feeling of dispair and anger at
having lost so much time and effort to such a trivial error.
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 29 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Ville Sarell on 18-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 28 (Chris):
In this case Allan had a backup, but as he was changing the hard drives or whatever,
there was a time period in which the backups didn't exist and of course the worst happens
in the worst possible moment. I have lost the content of my HD 3 times and never had backups !
One of in a demoparty when we switched HDs with my friend (the HD broke completely) and 2
times because of the lousy connection between Mikronik Z-2 bussboard and Catweasel/Buddha-idecontroller.
After that I have done several backups, usually through Envoy3 to the other Amiga and the HDs had never
had any problems after that (but problems WILL encounter, I'm sure of it and it's just nice to know you have
backups for that). Actually I had one problem during the period I had started to make backups. I lost a
RDB blocks, but replaced them with OS3.5 hdtoolbox, loading them from a single floppy. At least if some1
won't bother making backups from the whole HD, I suggest you atleast copy your workbench partition somewhere
safe AND also the RDB-blocks of your partitions to a disk (the latter is SO easy to make, I don't think anyone
can say they don't have time for it ;).
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 30 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Lightning on 18-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 28 (Chris):
I know the feeling well... when my diabolo backup failed on me after i repartitioned my primary drive the partition i'd lost was Programs: where all my non system apps live - including my email :p
you can imagine how i sat here in mute horror for a few minutes as, at the time, i thought i'd lost everything... then i remembered the backup CDs and had a prod at getting some files out of the diavolo backup (it failed only on certain files y'see...)
CDRs - the way forward! ;)
Lightning
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 31 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by ehaines on 18-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 23 (Anonymous):
: I wouldn't pay a hundred pounds for a CD-R just in case my hard
: drive screws up - there's only a one in million chance!!!
No, it's more like a one in one chance. The question is not "if" but
"when." Hint: drives don't have MTBF ratings for no reason. Better
hope your HD holds out until solid state storage becomes affordable
and renders this discussion moot. (Or at least somewhat less
relevant...there's always fire, theft, etc....)
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 32 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Alkis Tsapanidis on 20-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 27 (PaulT):
People like you give a bad name to the Amiga community...
F*** YOU
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 33 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by AdmV0rl0n on 20-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 27 (PaulT):
Once again, you`ve taken time to show us what you thinkwe may be interested to read. Thanks.
Personally, I`d ike to see people offering help if they can, and best wishes for alan if they can`t. However, you prefger to preach.
The last thing I`ll say is that most people who have computers are not professionals, and as such they go through things occuring.
You may find CD writers cheap, but you have little or no regard for those that don`t. The people who hit problems don`t need your "I told you so" rhetorical, high handed, I know it all approach. Far too many people like your good self offer little or nothing constructive aside from biting critical views on what occurs in life.
I`m sure AO knows that a backup would have be useful right about now, but circumstances lead to accidents sometimes. Thats what a accident is. A series of things occur to a point of failure.
I`ll repeat what I said earlier, IF YOU don`t have anything good to say, WHY not keep your lousy views to yourself. Thanks in appreciation.
AdmV
Seagate ST3660A needed : Comment 34 of 34ANN.lu
Posted by Johan Rönnblom on 20-Jan-2001 23:00 GMT
Of course, we'd all want to read about new interesting developments
every day on ANN.. but the truth is that there are not that many
developments. So there is some space left. Now that can of course be
used to tell us that version 2.863 (which removes a typo in version
2.862) of the blargh.library has been released, but maybe there are
some better uses for our attention.
Considering the superb quality of Allan's html-viewer, even though
it's unfinished, I'd very much like to see what he's doing this time.
And, posting this as news on ANN can make that happen.. so I don't see
why not. If it hurts someone's feelings that the Amiga world is so
small that this kind of news get spread then let it be so, because
that's just reality. Let's be happy about what we have, but there's no
reason to pretend.
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