This weeks special case was a 6GB Western Digital EIDE hard disk drive. That’s right! That was not a typo, six gigabytes of storage in one desktop hard drive that was manufactured in 1999. The data was distributed across two platters but only used 3 heads. This hard drive was making some very unusual screeching sounds and was not recognized. It turned out that head 0 was bad and the rear of the slider was dragging the platter. Fortunately there wasn’t any platter damage and the data was recovered. In this case it was important because the customer was hoping for a bootable image. This HDD was running Windows 98 and software to control a CNC machine.
The moral of the story is that you should back up critical data often, but business systems that can halt production should be imaged. If you need good imaging software we use R-Drive Image for our servers and Acronis True Image for our PCs.
Here is a look at the old head stack from a WD AC26400 HDD.
