9/2: Dead hard drive

Tony -

Definitely don't take it apart. I've got 13 computers of my own in my house right now, plus 3 of my dad's, my girlfriend's and my dad's girlfriend's - occasionally hard drives fail. Go to Quantum's website and see if they have an on-line return procedure. Basically, this will give you an RMA, you ship it back to them and they ship you a new (or repaired, but highly unlikely, since it generally isn't cost-effective) drive. You don't need to have anything except the drive to do this - no receipt, no manual, anything. If you call them, you can generally have them send you a replacement first, and then you pack up the old drive in the box they sent the new one in and ship it back to them (most of the time, postage paid!).

Most of the time, the manufacturer sends back a bigger drive than you sent in - it's to keep you buying their products ("hey, they're a good company, they sent me a bigger drive back") and because they generally don't have the older drives laying around. So they pull the next biggest size that they have available. In the summer of '99 I sent back a 4.3 gig drive to Maxtor and got a 17.2 back.

If you're intent on pulling a drive apart, send me that one and I'll hook you up with a drive you can destroy No sense in trashing a perfectly good (once you send it in and get it replaced) hard drive.